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11/29/2010 12:33:59 PM · #1 |
I need a black, spongy, more-or-less opaque material that I can cut to size and use in a camera that I'm building. For example, if I poke or drill a tiny hole through it (say with a needle), it should be elastic enough to close it off. I need something relatively cheap and readily available (from a hardware or craft store, for instance, or better yet, from around the house).
Any ideas? I have a few but feel like I'm missing something obvious. Thanks.
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11/29/2010 12:46:32 PM · #2 |
I've frequently run across a dark grey or black closed cell foam used in packing fragile products. If you keep the boxes from electronics you buy, check inside those.
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11/29/2010 01:02:46 PM · #3 |
| That sort of material they use for yoga mats, probably get it in an art supply shot or something similar :-) |
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11/29/2010 01:04:06 PM · #4 |
| How about neoprene, as is used for wet-suits? |
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11/29/2010 01:14:59 PM · #5 |
Originally posted by hojop25:
That sort of material they use for yoga mats, probably get it in an art supply shot or something similar :-) |
That's called "closed cell foam"...
R. |
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11/29/2010 01:49:56 PM · #6 |
| Awhile back I got something from a cheap craft/dollar store (NOT an art supply store) that kids are using instead of those squares of felt for cutting out shapes etc... Wonderful stuff, a kind of dense foam, and comes in all kinds of colours especially good for the latest in homemade cameras. |
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11/29/2010 02:32:58 PM · #7 |
Originally posted by tnun:
Awhile back I got something from a cheap craft/dollar store (NOT an art supply store) that kids are using instead of those squares of felt for cutting out shapes etc... Wonderful stuff, a kind of dense foam, and comes in all kinds of colours especially good for the latest in homemade cameras. |
I was going to suggest the same thing. If your walmart has a good craft section you should be able to find it there. It comes in different thickness from 1/8 of and inch to around a 1/4. and is around .50 cents to a dollar a sheet. |
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11/29/2010 07:11:18 PM · #8 |
I would check out places like Home Depot. They have foam, meant to seal doors and window. Usually called crack stuffer. Yeah, I know... lol You can find it roughly one inch wide, by a few millimetres thick. Nice, as it can be found with self adhesive backing.
It is quite resilient and should do the job nicely. Just an idea...
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11/29/2010 07:17:42 PM · #9 |
These are all great ideas. Thank you. I plan to check Lowe's and a well stocked department store or craft store. The foamy stuff that tnun describes might be just what I need. I seem to recall the material in crafts and toys. Looking at the packing foam described also.
Magnum, I think I had some of the stuff you described around here at one point. I live in a drafty old cracker box. I'll take a look. |
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11/29/2010 07:38:02 PM · #10 |
| you may want to check an automotive store for gasket material. |
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12/10/2010 06:24:49 PM · #11 |
The dense craft foam worked great.
If anyone's interested, here's what we have so far...
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12/10/2010 06:54:05 PM · #12 |
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01/06/2011 12:14:52 AM · #13 |
Finally got this put together. The pinhole is made from tinfoil and taped on the inside. Took about fifteen tries to get the right shape and size. Very tedious. The shutter is really clever -- a flat, flexible magnet -- the kind that your dentist and plumber hand out freely. It has a black backing, sticks readily to the tin, and slides off and on quickly and easily.
I loaded the camera with 200 speed film and took it to work Monday. It was sunny which I was happy about. It's usually so damn dark during the winter months here, that I guess I got carried away and overexposed most everything. No matter; most of the shots were salvageable.
The ticker failed. The idea was to advance the film and count eight ticks as a sliver of plastic moved across the sprocket holes. It was much too inaudible outdoors, and even so, came off track more than once. As a result, I had a few frames overlap slightly, but many more with huge gaps between them. This turned out to be okay, as it provided extra handling while scanning. But the film ended much sooner that I expected. Have to fix that.
I took the film to Target for developing and finally have some sample images to share. The felt that supports the film left a funny, pubic-hair looking profile on either side of each frame, which annoyed me at first. But looking again, they do complement some of the subject matter. And I'd have been disappointed if I didn't get something a little bit quirky. The sharpness was about as good as I was expecting, and many of the shots have nice sun flare and vignetting.
Here are a few scans. Thanks for looking.
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01/06/2011 12:47:44 AM · #14 |
| This is just so cool. I'm in awe. |
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01/06/2011 12:52:36 AM · #15 |
| I never suspected that foamy felt stuff was made of pubic hair. Whose, I wonder. It does add what we might otherwise HOPE is a little je ne sais quoi. |
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01/06/2011 01:00:09 AM · #16 |
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01/06/2011 01:15:16 AM · #17 |
Impressive exposures. You have the aperture listed as f/126, rather large hole! I'm curious, did you measure the distance to the film plane, or is that one reason why you made 15 different pinholes?
Did you meter and compensate, or guesstimate/modify the sunny 16?
Nice work! |
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01/06/2011 04:33:53 AM · #18 |
| This is shockingly creative and a massive success, pubic hair and all. Well done. |
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01/06/2011 04:17:00 PM · #19 |
You are a Luthier of fine pinhole cameras!!
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01/06/2011 10:25:57 PM · #20 |
Originally posted by tph1:
You are a Luthier of fine pinhole cameras!! |
I don't know about that! I'm a sloppy craftsman. Go hang out at f295.com. Those guys are amazing in what they build.
I've had this idea in mind since I built the very "unfine" Populist camera from a Cheerios box. I wanted something similar but more sturdy and durable. Trouble was finding the right sized tin box. A souvenir store near the beach we visit each year had one, but I'll be damned if I was paying eight bucks (!) for a stupid tin and deck of cards. A year later, after having looked elsewhere and buying the wrong sized box on eBay, I splurged.
Originally posted by bspurgeon:
You have the aperture listed as f/126, rather large hole! I'm curious, did you measure the distance to the film plane, or is that one reason why you made 15 different pinholes? |
The focal length is 15/16 inch. Pinhole theory (really optical theory) states that there is an optimum hole size for a given focal length. As focal length increases, so does the diameter of your hole, but not in a linear fashion. Anyway, I used Mr. Pinhole to get the hole size. It took fifteen different tries (and fifteen high res scans to measure) to get something roughly circular and roughly the right diameter.
Originally posted by bspurgeon:
Did you meter and compensate, or guesstimate/modify the sunny 16?
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I guessed based on Sunny 16. Mr. Pinhole suggested a quarter second at EV 15 for my combination pinhole and film speed. I thought that seemed too fast, but it's probably about right. I think with 800 speed film, I can actually do some candids!
Thanks everyone for the comments. (T, I don't know, but it's not mine. I should be more careful next time where I get my supplies.)
Message edited by author 2011-01-06 22:26:52. |
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02/09/2011 09:17:45 PM · #21 |
This crazy project continues...
So an idea occurred to me after seeing the results of my first roll of film through this "camera." To recap, I used 200 speed film and still managed to overexpose most of the shots using shutter speeds of around one second. My first instinct was to use slower film, or wait for dawn or dusk or lots of clouds. As these things go, I have an excess of 800 speed film here. So my idea was this: If I use faster film and find some way to control the shutter, I could probably do almost-but-not-not-quite stop action pinhole photography (!). And what camera could be less conspicuous on the street than a powder blue tin box?
Controlling the shutter was key. With 800 speed film on a sunny 16 day, Mr. Pinhole suggests an exposure time of 1/15 second. Well, how the hell do I count that off? Anything less than a second is a crap shoot. So here's what I did.
First I needed a better shutter. I had been using a black rubber magnet to cover the pinhole, pulling it off and sticking back on to make the exposure (remember the body is tin). But that certainly wouldn't work for anything less than a second. Noticing that the magnet slides nicely across the tin, I had the idea to cut a small rectangle in the middle of the magnet and slide it across the pinhole. A pseudo-curtain shutter.
But I still needed some way to measure the fractional-second exposure time. And more than that, be able to repeat it. So I built a shutter speed tester. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, and with three dollars worth of parts from Radio Shack, I could accurately measure shutter speeds for this and my other cheap film cameras. It's basically a phototransistor on a circuit that feeds into your PC's sound card. Using software like Audacity, you can "record and measure" a shutter actuation.
Here you can see it rigged into the camera.
I taped the phototransistor to the inside of the pinhole, turned off the room lights and aimed a flashlight toward the pinhole. Then I simulated slow and fast shutter movements and measured the results. My goal was to achieve repeatable shutter movements of 1/15, 1/8 and 1/4 second. Repeated tedious exercises confirmed that it was possible. In theory anyway. We'll see if it holds up in the field.
I'm no electrician -- rather, here is a madman's schematic.
Even though it looks like I'm being overly scientific about this and trying to achieve an unachievable amount of precision, all I really want is a loose sort of yardstick to measure faster shutter speeds. I don't expect results as academic and uninteresting as all of this. At the end of the day, we're still dealing with a camera made from household junk.
Stay tuned. |
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02/09/2011 09:37:18 PM · #22 |
Do we need to sign a NDA?
Fascinating work Brian. |
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02/09/2011 10:02:47 PM · #23 |
Originally posted by bspurgeon:
Fascinating work Brian. |
That remains to be seen... But thanks! |
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02/09/2011 10:53:12 PM · #24 |
| is this the "What if McGyver were a photographer" thread? |
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02/10/2011 01:40:45 AM · #25 |
You are pushing the boundaries! I took the coward's way out so far ΓΆ€“ slowest film I can get and, unlike mad dogs and Englishmen, I avoid the midday sun. My fumbles with my 'shutter' are thus diluted into insignificance in the forgiving bosom of time.
I admire your ingenuity for the same reason I do your photographs: the absolute refusal to be limited. Bravo! |
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