Creating Pinhole Images

The first step to create our pinhole camera was choosing what box would be suitable to use. For my camera I chose a "Red Jeans" perfume tin. I thought the roundness of the tin would give my photos a nice rounded effect. As my tin was made from metal i had to drill a 6mm hole through it before i could begin anything else. Once this was drilled we had to paint the inside of the tin and the lid a matt black. This would stop any extra light getting into the camera and causing my pictures to be ruined. Drying the paint took a while so to speed it up a bit we used hairdryers and handryers.

Once they were dry we stuck tin foil onto the front to cover the 6mm hole. This was stuck down by gaffa tape and would attract the light to my camera. Once the foil was on a 0.8mm pinhole was put through the foil and the 6mm hole. This would be our lens. We then needed a shutter to stop the light getting in before we wanted to take the photo. This was made using a square of cardboard being stuck tightly over the pinhole with more gaffa tape. When we ready to take our photo we would open this to expose the sunlight to the hole. To determine how long our exposure would be we had to use a simple maths formula to get our "f-stop"

This formula was:

f stop= Distance from pinhole to paper (mm) / Diameter of pinhole

f stop= 60/0.8
f stop= f-75
My exposure time would then be:
Inside- 3 Minutes exposure time
Outside- 30 Seconds exposure time-
Once we had worked this out we went through to the dark room to load our cameras ready for taking photos. We roughly measured the paper to fit our box and sealed the light and shutter tight until we were ready to take photos. Once we were loaded we chose our starting location, mine was the construction site, and opened my shutter and left it open for 30 seconds. When the 30 seconds were up I shut my shutter and headed back inside to the dark room.
Inside the dark room we took the photo paper out with tongs, so we didn't get any fingerprints onto the photo paper. The first tub we had to put the paper in was filled with developer. this would bring the photo to the surface and we'd get the initial idea of how our photos would look. After 30 seconds of being in the developer we moved it to the water to rinse off for 10 seconds. Once it was rinsed we put it in the fix for 30 seconds to preserve the image. After that it was placed in an empty tray and taken out into the light so we can see how the pictures came out. If we liked what we saw we would then put them back into the fix for a further 5 minutes, to make sure the image stays on the paper, and then in the water for 5 minutes to rinse the excess chemicals off the paper. We then put them through a press dryer to make them easier to handle. Once all this was completed we had our first pinhole photo and we repeated this many times to get many more pictures. =D