It’s nearly Christmas, and a lot of people have time off of work at this time of the year. While this is a wonderful season for many reasons, there’s a chance that at some point you might find yourself a little bored. If you do, this article could be just what you need, because we’re going to do something fun and crazy. We’re going to capture surreal images without a lens!

Below is a photograph that I captured using a homemade pinhole “lens” (pictured above) that takes peculiar pictures. In this article I’ll show you how you can do this yourself—no special tools or skills required. It’s cheap (probably free, in fact), easy, and fun. All you need is an interchangeable-lens camera and a body cap.

Let’s do some homemade pinhole macro photography!

Note: this was a Creative Collective article, but now it’s available to everyone.

The first step is to locate a camera body cap. You probably already have one lying around somewhere that you don’t use; however, you might not want to “destroy” it in case you later sell your camera. I happened to have an extra one somehow. You can buy an “official” Fujifilm body cap for $10 or a generic one for $4. If you don’t want make your own, you can buy a pinhole lens for $70, and it’s probably going to be better than a homemade one. For this project, I used an official Fujifilm body cap that I already owned.

Step two is to drill a tiny hole in the center of the body cap. I didn’t have any drill bits that were small enough, so I used a screw, and stopped turning just as soon as the tip poked through. Even though the hole was small (which you can see in the pictures below) it was actually much too big. I put a piece of black electrical tape (you could alternatively use duct tape) over the hole on the inside of the cap, and then poked a tiny hole using a small sewing needle, sending it through the hole made by the screw, but not poking it all the way through. The hole needs to be especially small—that’s why they call it pinhole photography.

Once you have your pinhole lens made, the next step is to attach it to your camera. Within the camera menu, enable “Shoot Without Lens” or else your camera won’t let you capture a picture. Also, set the camera to Manual Focus—there’s no ability to focus, manual or otherwise, and maybe this doesn’t matter, but to me it makes sense to set it to Manual. Now you’re ready to shoot!

I discovered several things when I started capturing pictures with the pinhole lens.

First, the aperture is roughly around f/256. That means you need a lot of light! I used my Ilford XP2 Super 400 film simulation recipe on a Fujifilm X-H1 with the ISO cranked all the way up to ISO 12800—this was outdoors on a bright and sunny day, and the shutter speed was usually less than 1/100, sometimes much less. The “lens” doesn’t have any glass to focus the light, so it’s going to be soft, but, because of the tiny aperture, you’ll also have a huge amount of diffraction, so you just have to know going into this that the pictures aren’t going to be sharp. The extreme softness is a big reason why the pictures seem so surreal, and is a part of the charm—use it creatively!

Next, the focal-length is somewhere right around 20mm (30mm full-frame-equivalent). Knowing roughly the aperture and the focal-length, it’s possible to more-or-less calculate the depth-of-field, if I could figure out where the lens was focusing at. After several experiments, I decided that the point-of-focus is somewhere around 2″ to 2 1/4″, which puts the depth-of-field roughly between 3/4″ and 5″ (the pictures seem to confirm this). Nothing within that range will be anywhere close to “tack sharp” but will be a little less blurry than elsewhere. It also means that this is a macro lens, and you need to get close to the subject (although, again, use the blur creatively). All of this is variable, depending on the size of the hole and such.

I had strong vignetting in the pictures, so I used the 1:1 aspect ratio to minimize it. Because the vignetting wasn’t even (it was strongest on the bottom-right corner, and least strong on the upper-right), I cropped the pictures a little in an effort to even it out some.

Also, because of the tiny aperture, any and all dust spots on the sensor will be easily visible, especially in the lighter and less busy parts of the frame. Even a sensor that seems to be clean will likely show some dust spots.

Below are some sample pictures captured using the homemade pinhole lens on a Fujifilm X-H1. My favorite photograph is the one towards the top of this article.

If you are bored one day (or stuck in some photographic rut), give this DIY pinhole trick a try. You might not capture any award-winning images (although you never know…), but you’ll certainly have fun, and, if nothing else, photography should be fun.