How to Make a Pinhole Camera

Easy (5min), Advanced (Day Projects), and Beyond!

21 min read by Dmitri, with image(s) by Daren.
Published on October 21, 2025. Updated on October 21, 2025.

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In time for Halloween (which is just a few days away from this article’s publication date), I made a pumpkin pinhole “self-portrait” in scary red. 🎃 Learn how I made this camera and the photo.

Homemade cameras are fun, and they come with lots of creative potential. My earlier project was the world’s first edible film camera with a working lens made of sugar. It even ended up on the national news and several popular blogs.

However, pinhole cameras can also be challenging, time-consuming, and frustrating if you haven’t planned out and researched everything relevant to the project. After all, photography is only part art — the rest is science.

This article is structured to take you through the entire process of creating a pinhole camera in several levels: from a 5-minute project to elaborate works of art and commercial products.

In this guide: Prerequisites. What is a pinhole camera? How does a pinhole camera work? Five-minute pinhole. How to calculate pinhole exposures. Building a box pinhole with instant film. Building a box pinhole with regular film. Advanced features for pinhole cameras. How I built a pumpkin pinhole and took a haunted Halloween photo with it. Beyond a pinhole: sugar lens. Paper shutter. Commercial pinhole cameras. Solarized pinhole exposures. Addendum. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

Prerequisites.

The simplest pinhole camera design barely needs any tools (cardboard, scissors, and a sewing needle), and you can rely on your camera’s built-in light meter to take photos with it. It doesn’t even need to be a film camera! But it has to accept interchangeable lenses.

However, if you’d like to build a box pinhole, you may need to develop your own film at home (unless you’re planning to make an instant film version).

If you’re new to film photography, consider reading or bookmarking this read: “A Beginner’s Guide to Film Photography.”

A pinhole camera made form a cardboard box.

What is a pinhole camera?

A pinhole camera uses a tiny aperture to project light onto a surface — be it film, a digital sensor, or just a wall for immediate viewing — without relying on refraction.

An aperture is an opening or a hole that controls the amount of light that can enter the camera. Larger apertures let in more light, but they rely more heavily on the refractive properties of glass or plastic elements to focus the light. As the aperture gets smaller, less light can enter the camera, but it’s easier to focus. Once the aperture becomes smaller than 𝒇128 (I’ll explain what this number means later), it can function without a lens.

Pinhole cameras are a good way to learn about photography; they play a major role in creative and experimental projects.

One of the best-known societies that celebrates pinholes is the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

Pinholes are also used in scientific applications (example).

How does a pinhole camera work?

Whereas a lens uses its refractive properties to collect and focus incoming light onto a small point, a pinhole is already small; thus, it does not need to bend the light. Whatever enters it ends up being projected onto the opposite side.

A) a real-world object, B) projection inside the camera obscura. Wikimedia C.

Looking directly through a pinhole is not the same thing as seeing an image projected through one.

The projection is usually a flat representation of three-dimensional space, and it forms upside-down and left-to-right as the rays of light cross (the same effect is achieved with focusing lenses).

We’ve used pinholes to build camera obscuras (rooms where we could observe the projections from the inside) for over two thousand years — many centuries before we could fix those images on film.

☝︎ Further reading: “A brief history of photography (1826-2010).”

The simplest and fastest project is converting your SLR into a pinhole camera with a piece of cardboard.

Five-minute pinhole.

Tools. Black cardboard or any kind of art paper that doesn’t let any light through. Scissors, a sewing needle, and a camera (film or digital) that accepts interchangeable lenses. Your camera may be an SLR, DSLR, mirrorless/rangefinder, view, etc.

The idea is simple: poke a small hole in a piece of paper and cover the lens mount with it. And in that moment, that piece of paper with a tiny hole becomes your lens.

A pinhole “lens” — a tiny hole inside a cardboard circle.

If you are using an SLR, try looking through your finder with and without the pinhole. Though very dark, a pinhole image is discernible, whereas having no lens in front of an SLR is disastrous for image quality. If you can’t see the image, try looking outside over the tree tops towards the sun — you should be able to see the shapes of the tree tops.

A simple cardboard pinhole photo.

Your new pinhole has some advantages and disadvantages compared to a typical camera lens:

On the plus side, this is the thinnest lens possible. If portability is your objective, nothing beats a pinhole “lens.” There are also no focus controls as everything is in focus — near and far, at all times. And, of course, there’s just one aperture — although it’s possible to switch pinhole apertures if needed. A larger aperture would create a softer, brighter image; a smaller aperture would give a sharper but dimmer image.

The roundness of the pinhole and the smoothness of its edges can make images sharper. If you’d like to try the best-case scenario, you can look for laser-cut metal pinhole inserts online.

However, pinhole cameras let in very limited amounts of light; the image is always soft, and there are several artifacts, such as vignetting. Though it’s worth noting that artists or just creatively inclined photographers often enjoy the distinct imperfections in pinhole photographs.

Taking a pinhole photo. If you’re using an SLR with through-the-lens metering and autoexposure features, it will help you expose your pinhole images correctly. Keep in mind that pinholes let in a very small amount of light, expect to keep your camera steady for about one second in full sunlight (you may like to use a tripod!)

If your camera can not expose your images correctly (for example, if it doesn’t have through-the-lens metering), read the next chapter to calculate your exposures manually.

Experimenting with pinhole design. Different pinholes will make different quality images. You may try making yours out of different materials. For the next pinhole camera, we’ll make one of tin foil for a little more precision.

Poking a pinhole in a tin foil can help with precision and image quality compared to cardboard.

How to calculate pinhole exposures.

Whereas for most lenses you can use external light meters or the Sunny 16 Rule to estimate the correct exposure settings, pinholes take a little more work to get right.

Light meters typically don’t list values for pinhole-sized apertures (which typically range between 𝒇128 and 𝒇256). Plus, if you’ve made your pinhole at home, you may not know what its f-number is.

An f-number is a ratio between the focal length and the aperture size. This is a necessary bit of information you’ll need to calculate your exposure, so let’s start there.

Since a pinhole is too small to measure with a ruler, the easiest way to do that at home is to place your pinhole (whether it’s a piece of cardboard or a tin foil) onto a scanner and take a note of the DPI resolution in your scanning software. Select a small area where the pinhole is located and scan it.

Then, using software of your choice, zoom in as far as you can and measure the diameter of your pinhole in pixels (or count them by hand).

In the image above, I’ve counted 25 pixels across. My scanning software was set to 1200 DPI (dots or pixels per inch), which means that my pinhole is 25 / 1200 = 0.020833 inches wide or about 0.53mm.

If you’re using a pinhole cutout with your camera, look up the flange distance for the model you’re using — that will be your focal length. Otherwise, measure the distance from your pinhole to the back of your camera where the film will sit and convert that to millimetres.

Finally, to get the f-number for your pinhole camera, divide your focal length by the pinhole diameter (remember, everything must be in millimetres). For me, it was 82mm / 0.53mm = 𝒇155.

✪ Note: Your pinhole’s focal length can also inform the angle of view of your image.

Since typical light meters won’t let you input aperture values this large, you can use a table to convert your readings. I used Mr. Pinhole’s website. It works like this: meter your scene using a standard aperture value like 𝒇16 and take a note of the shutter speed your light meter suggests for the film ISO speed you’re planning to shoot. Then enter your measured aperture values on Mr. Pinhole’s website and use a table to find your shutter speed for 𝒇16 and look for a matching exposure value for your aperture.

For example, if I’m shooting an ISO 200 film in the shade at 𝒇16, the recommended shutter speed may be 1/30. Mr. Pinhole’s equivalent for my 𝒇155 pinhole aperture is 3 seconds.

Lastly, for exposures that are one second or longer, you’ll need to factor in reciprocity failures. A reciprocity failure is a film’s tendency to lose sensitivity at longer exposure times.

To figure out reciprocity failure for your film, look up “datasheet + film name” online. There, you may find a section about it. For Harman Phoenix 200, the reciprocity value can be calculated using the Tm^1.31 formula (listed in the document) — where Tm is the exposure time. In other words, my 3-second exposure should be 3^1.31 = 4 seconds.

Gingerbread 2 homemade camera used instant film.

Building a box pinhole with instant film.

Instant film can be uniquely useful in pinhole cameras, as it gives quick feedback, and you don’t need to know how to develop at home.

However, you will still need an instant film camera and a dark bag or a completely blacked-out room (maybe a bathroom) to develop your instant film.

The process is something like this:

Once you’ve made your pinhole camera (see below), take your film pack and some sticky tacks, double-sided, or regular tape and in complete darkness, take out one frame and mount it at the back of the camera, where the light will be projected. Remember that Polaroid film is light-sensitive at the front of the frame, but Instax film is light-sensitive at the back (thus, you should mount your Instax film facing the black side towards the pinhole). Make sure to practice your movements before going into the dark.

Remember the place the dark slide back on top of your film pack to avoid ruining the rest of the frames.

Once you’ve taken your photo, place your entire pinhole camera in complete darkness again, retrieve the frame, put it into the film back, and cover it with a dark slide. In dim light, load your film pack (with your exposed frame at the top, just underneath a dark slide) into your instant film camera, cover the lens completely (so there’s no light coming in) and take a photo — your camera will feed your film through the rollers, and it should develop shortly.

You can also try integrating Jollylook hand-crankable instant film development units into your pinhole cameras, which is how the Gingerbread 1 camera works — when done correctly, there’s no need to step into the darkness before and after the shot. However, it may take considerable effort to make everything fit perfectly and be free of light leaks.

Building a box pinhole with regular film.

To make a camera, all you need is a box and a pinhole. However, to take a photo, you’ll need a shutter and some film.

✪ Note: It’s recommended that you develop your pinhole camera film at home. Learn how to develop colour film here, black-and-white here.

The trick is to keep your pinhole separate from the box — that way you can easily change it, fix it and scan it to measure.

I used a nice-looking, sturdy box that was lying around the house for mine. For the pinhole, I’ve cut a circular hole in the middle and attached my pin-pricked tin foil using tape from the inside (so that it keeps looking neat on the outside).

The inside of camera box’ lid with the pinhole attached to it.

For the shutter, I simply used a Nikon lens cap with some sticky tack stuff around the edge to mount it and keep the light away.

A box pinhole camera that uses a lens cap as a shutter.

Pinhole camera “shutter.”

You should also ensure that the inside surfaces of your box camera are as dark as possible. Internal reflections will cause your images to lose contrast and other issues.

I don’t own spray paint, and I don’t want to use toxic aerosols inside my apartment. Instead, I used black cardboard paper and some tape to make the inside of my pinhole dark.

Inside of a pinhole camera — that’s where the film goes!

You will need to load your film into your pinhole camera in complete darkness. If you plan to use roll film (I’m using 35mm film in this article), mount it so that it curls towards the lens — that is, the edges of it would want to peel off the back of your camera first.

I used sticky tacks here again. Tape will work too, but it’s harder to manipulate in complete darkness than small sticky balls.

To measure a strip of film in complete darkness, you’ll need to stretch it out and hold it next to your box camera to feel for the size. Then cut a strip slightly smaller than the box (to account for the thickness of the walls).

The direction of the curl of your roll film inside of a pinhole camera.

Once you’ve exposed your film strip, you’ll need to place your pinhole camera back into complete darkness and mount the film onto a reel for development.

Paterson plastic reels can be finicky with straight film corners. I suggest you keep scissors with you and try to carefully cut the corners of your film strip so that it’s easier to mount.

Cutting the film strip corners before mounting it onto a Paterson plastic film reel can help a lot. Be careful not to cut a hole in your dark bag!

And that’s all! You now have a fully-functioning pinhole camera and, hopefully, a way to develop your film quickly after taking your photo.

Though black-and-white film can be a little harder for beginners than C-41, it can be more convenient for pinhole cameras, as there are fewer tools you’ll need to prepare.

Of course, there’s no need to make things simple if you’d like to go deeper into the rabbit hole of homemade cameras.

Advanced features for pinhole cameras.

Above, I mentioned integrating an instant film development unit with pinhole cameras. That can be challenging — so is a film advance mechanism that some photographers implement with their cameras. But of course, that’s doable.

You also don’t have to conform to just a single pinhole. Multiple pinholes can be used at the same time to create unique effects. By the way, your pinhole does not need to be dead center — moving it to another part of your camera will change how it renders perspectives. Lots of potential there.

Of course, a camera doesn’t have to be a box. I’ve made and eaten film cameras out of gingerbread, and for this article, I housed my box pinhole inside a pumpkin (using a pumpkin itself as a pinhole camera is also possible, though quite challenging, considering that it has to be blacked out and the rind will allow some light in).

Lastly, you can do all kinds of things to film that you’re exposing inside your pinhole, including tiling (like in the photo below), and the more common effects, such as redscaling, push processing, etc.

How I built a pumpkin pinhole and took a haunted Halloween photo with it.

“Pumpkin Red’s Haunted Selfie.”

The image above took over an hour to expose properly (reciprocity failure is crazy-long in dim light!)

The idea was to set up a scene where the pinhole camera, dressed up in a pumpkin, surrounded by candles, takes a “self-portrait” through a mirror. Here’s what it looked like from the outside:

“Pumpkin in the mirror” scene setup.

As you can see, there was quite a bit happening on top of my table. The camera was inside a pumpkin, set up to take a photo of itself in relative darkness (I turned off the studio light when I began the exposure).

I have also deliberately mounted the film strips facing “the wrong way” inside the camera; in other words, I redscaled the film. And since redscaled film has a decreased sensitivity (Phoenix Red, which is the same as redscaled Phoenix 200 — a film I’m using to photograph the pumpkin), I’ve also pushed it one stop.

One more, a (less compositionally successful) pumpkin exposure.

With the three strips, it was very tricky to get the right amount of pumpkin in the frame. The original plan was to redscale and develop Phoenix 200 as a slide film with Rodinal, but I completely ran out of time for something as elaborate as that.

If I were to do this again, I’d try to add more light for shorter exposures and get even closer to the pumpkin (since everything’s in focus at all times anyway).

The end result feels a little hard to visually understand, unless the viewer knows how the photo was made. Still, I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Maybe I’ll try again next year using what I’ve learned here.

You are, of course, free to run with this idea. In fact, I’d love to see your projects and the results — just add a comment below or submit a draft to be published on this blog.

Here’s some more from that day:

Gutting the pumpkin.

A test shot of the pumpkin with a simple camera-mounted pinhole.

Another test shot from earlier, this time using Ilford Ortho Plus film.

Beyond a pinhole: sugar lens.

Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to pinholes to make film cameras at home. Gingerbread 1 was the world’s first instant film camera to use a lens made of sugar, which means it’s possible and novel for you to do as well. The trick is to guestimate focal length with a ground glass or wax paper to get the focus right.

One serious downside to sugar lens design is how blurry and distorted the images turn out to be. My design was limited by the shape I could mould using confectionery tools, but even with a perfect tool, molten sugar has lots of bubbles and quickly becomes dull.

But it may all be worth it for the amount of light a sugar lens can focus compared to a pinhole.

Sugar lenses moulded from melted Jolly Ranchers. Not recommended, use isomalt sugar instead.

Another related project is the fully functioning LEGO film camera made with a genuine LEGO plastic component that serves as a lens.

Paper shutter.

Pinhole cameras typically require a tripod or a stationary position because exposures are often multiple seconds or minutes long. However, a sugar lens can shorten the exposure time to offer the possibility of a hand-held, homemade camera. And such a camera would need a better shutter than a lens cap with some sticky tacks.

A portrait of me in front of a small Christmas tree in my apartment’s dimly-lit lobby via Gingerbread 2 (handheld).

Shutter mechanisms are some of the most complicated components in film cameras. Still, you can make one out of paper (here’s how I did it), and it will work with pinhole and sugar lens cameras alike.

With such a shutter, the advantage of a sugar lens becomes hand-held exposures in dim light. A pinhole camera may even use a simplified version of such a shutter, activated slowly by hand rather than gravity.

Commercial pinhole cameras.

Just because a pinhole camera is easy to make at home doesn’t mean others haven’t tried to make them commercially. There are several pinhole cameras currently available on the market. New materials, software, and continued innovation can still make improvements to this ancient instrument today.

Solarized pinhole exposures.

Lastly, pinhole cameras are uniquely rugged, discrete, and capable of months or even years-long exposures on photographic paper. With exposures this long, the process is a little different, as the image is almost “burned” into the paper, but it’s no less fascinating to see the sun trace paths across the sky as the days pass.

A five-months-long exposure with a solarized pinhole.

If you’d like to make your own slar pinhole camera, the process would be identical to everything you’ve read above. The main difference is that it’ll need to be able to withstand the weather (or be placed inside next to a window), and the light-sensitive material would be black-and-white photographic paper.

Once the exposure is complete (or whenever you’re ready), the photographic paper can be taken out in daylight.

It will fade after a little while, but you should have enough time to scan it and get a decent image out of it. Interestingly, solarized black-and-white paper scans in colour! (sort of.)

More about solargraphy.

Addendum.

The red pumpkin photo compresses terribly for the web. As a lossily-compressed JPEG, it looks blocky and low-quality. But as a GIF, it looks good thanks to the format’s lossless compression and the pumpkin photo’s virtually monochromatic palette.

I’ve formatted this article to render the redscaled photos as GIFs, giving you maximum detail with the zoomable 4000-pixel-wide 4MB files. Because image hosting and delivery are costly for this website, this would not be possible without your support. Thank you!