Seeing Inside a Pinhole Camera

Two years ago, I thought it would be cool to see video footage from inside of a pinhole camera, so we put together this little contraption. It's a real mess of tape and balancing things at various heights, lol. It was made for a video about DIY film development and shoebox cameras. This particular setup isn't featured more than you see here, but I was really pleased with how well it worked.

Incredible! The exposed view shows the far side of the pinhole camera's interior, which isn't the intended imaging plane, but it still gets enough exposure for this to work. Light is reflecting off of cardboard, so variations in brightness display a lot better than color. It's effectively a detailed shadow. For a demo like this, you end up just trying to frame silhouettes, but you do get a more sensible image if you put some real film in there.

I can't remember what my A7S2 was set to, but even at f/1.4 and a fairly slow shutter, the ISO might have been pushing upwards of— I don't know, 20 to 64k or something. Really gasping for light inside that dark little box, and it's a testament to that camera that you can see anything in there.

Anyway, what a sight!