Money Saving Ideas

[Interpreter]

I have been reading about some very interesting ways to save money when using digital cameras.
One gentleman saved loads on a new lens by buying a camera body cap and converting it into a pinhole camera. He did this by drilling a 1/4 inch hole in the centre of the body cap and sticking silver foil over the hole. He then used a needle to make the pin hole. His exposures started at about 2 seconds and he experimented from there on. He also made a telephoto lens in the same manner, but used cardboard tubes as the extension. His images were rather blurred, but after putting them through PhotoShop, they were as good as any other images. The only problem was the length of the exposure.
The second idea concerned macro (or micro) photography. With flat objects, you don't even need a camera. Use your scanner. I tried this and produced an image about 2 million pixels square. It was too big to work with, so I rescanned the object ( a feather) at 9600 pixels and produced a very good image. I uploaded it to the site to go with this post, but due to the rules it had to be deleted as it was not classed as wildlife. Never mind, you will have to take my word for it.
There must be dozens of ways of saving money and still producing usable results. Does anybody have any ideas?

[RichBrew]

The technique using an SLR as a pinhole camera was something that occured to me over twenty years ago. In my case I used an Olympus OM 2n, which had a shutter speed up to 120 seconds in auto mode: the OTF metering took care of the exposure. The "lens" were my extension tubes. I, too, covered the tube with silver foil and made the aperture with a sewing needle. The foil was held in place with nothing more exotic than a rubber band, and I varied the focal length by adding or subtracting the various tube lengths. Film stock was Kodachrome 64.

RichBrew