Lens Introduction

To achieve an image with enough light to be filmed by the Sony EX1 camera, a lens is needed. By simply using a pinhole alone, with a clear focus, means the hole has to be very small. If the hole is large enough to give a good light level it means the focus goes soft. The lens we have is from an overhead projector and has a very large projection size (thanks to Val for lending it to us).

I also dismantled an old photographic slide viewer I had knocking around which delivered some positive results also. The lenses from the slide viewer are a lot smaller and created much smaller images than the projector lens shown above.

I set about experimenting with the different lenses I now had in the hope of achieving a much brighter image. I did however know that by introducing a lens into the filmable pinhole camera system I would be looking at issues with depth of field, image size and perspective, which isn't such a problem with an image created by a simple hole in a piece of tinfoil.