Re:Guide to Pinhole Photography (2013)
by Finnucane on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @11:58AM
(#17188784)
It's not difficult. You need a camera and a pinhole. With my Speed Graphic, I tape some tinfoil over a lensboard and poke a hole in it with a pin. If you know roughly the size of the hole you can make a good enough estimate of the exposure time. Then it's basically point and shoot.
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With a digital camera, a person could go out in bright sunlight, play with ISO and/or shutter speed, then calculate fstop using Sunny 16 and looking at histograms.
I was think more about buying a sensor and an arduino....
When I looked, most parts-house available sensors are small and even a 1" format sensors are pretty dear. MFT, APS-C, etc. were a multiple of a complete entry level interchangeable lens camera. For a pinhole camera with a small sensor, it's going to be hard to frame a specific subject because the sensor's field of view is tiny. Even a wire viewfinder will probably struggle with framing due to parallax. Basically the low cost sensor for pinhole photography is photo-chemical film.
A hacky alternative for a might be modifying a flatbed scanner. Just step the photo array slowly enough that there's reasonable exposure at each point. The good part is that a flatbed scanner is a stupid big sensor and there is some literature for hacking them. But for a pinhole, I'd expect the exposures to be rather long even for pinhole photography.
This post [1] describes how to use the electronics in a webcam. But you're essentially just replacing the webcam's lens with a pinhole.
What you're basically asking is how to build a webcam from components. Which I assume is possible but non-trivial.
[1] https://shutterhub.org.uk/how-to-build-a-digital-pinhole-cam...