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PINHOLE NARRATIVES
© Mike Connealy
"...toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son."
...all of life is a dream, and dreams but dreams of dreams.
-- Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Pinhole images are quite different in character from those produced by lenses. Such images are found to be fundamentally unsharp if examined closely. However, it will also be seen that the small aperture of the pinhole creates a depth of focus which makes everything equally in focus from a few inches to infinity. Projecting an image from a pinhole onto a flat plane results in some vignetting due to light fall-off at the frame edges.
Although the pinhole thus presents a type of image to which we are unaccustomed, it might be argued that the pinhole is depicting a truer version of reality because there is nothing but air between the real world and the image projected onto the film plane. The pinhole camera's film plane may be curved to allow more even illumination, but this only only works on one axis for a flattened print image. Trade-offs in image fidelity to expectations are inevitable in producing images by both pinholes and lenses. In the end, it is probably all a mixture of interpretation and illusion that we are really talking about, and one of the pinhole's virtures is that it reminds us of the slippery nature of reality.
The pinhole phenomenon has been known and exploited since Antiquity. Projected pinhole images occur frequently in nature, but they often go unrecognized. The dappled light which may be seen on a shaded wall or on the forest floor is actually composed of multiple indistinct images of the sun's disk. The nature of these naturally formed images becomes more apparent during a solar eclipse. If one looks then at a wall shaded by trees, the pinholes formed by the intersections of leaves and branches will be seen to be projecting a multitude of images of the crescent sun.
Once the origin of such images was deduced – and people had sufficient leisure and resources – the pinhole image became a source of entertainment and functionality. Renaissance artists made use of pinhole images as drawing aids, and the development of glass lenses greatly increased the portability and practicality of image projection devices.
While an understanding of the pinhole phenomenon was a necessary precursor to photography, pinholes actually played a very minor role in the discovery of that process early in the 19th Century. By that time, lens design was already well advanced and the brightness of images projected by a lens was crucial to the photographic process because of the weak response of early photo-sensitive materials. Also, it was not the projection of an image – be it through a pinhole or a lens – that signalled the arrival of photography, but rather the ability to fix the image permanently on a flat surface so that it could later be viewed and transported.
Photography was thus at that point more a triumph of chemistry than of optics. There was some experimentation with pinhole photographic images from the earliest days, but it became a much more feasible pursuit with the development of modern, fast films. The invigoration of interest in pinhole photography since the early 1980's may also be thought of as kind of a backlash to an over-abundance of "perfect" lens-made images which has somewhat devalued their importance in everyday life.
Perhaps the greatest attraction of producing pinhole images is the lure of making something out of nothing – a kind of magic. A light-tight box with a hole in it and a piece of film or photographic paper wielded by anyone is capable of producing a detailed depiction of a natural scene equalling or surpassing the capabilities of the finest draftsman. That was certainly part of the allure of early photographic endeavors, and it is possible to recapture some of that early enthusiasm for the photographic arts by constructing and using your own pinhole camera.
Of course, one can also spend real money on acquiring somewhat complicated and artfully designed pinhole cameras, but none of them is really likely to produce images superior to those from the simplest home-made pinhole cameras if used with a bit of patience and perseverance.
Two Views of a Solar Eclipse
Lens assisted images.
Natural pinhole images projected through leaves and branches onto a wall.
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I thought about doing pinhole photography for a long time before finally getting to making some pictures. We were living at that point in a rather remote rural location in the desert north of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Our closest neighbor, a half-mile distant, had a small ranch beside the Rio Grande where he sponsored a yearly rodeo for the local cowboys. Before we fenced our five acres, his horses would often loiter around our house, plucking beans off the mesquite trees.
Having spent some years in the high desert country of southern Idaho we quickly felt at home in the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico. We got a couple of horses for our corral which let us take advantage of the last tract of BLM land adjacent to our place. We put out bird seed and water near our south windows and enjoyed visits from the local rabbits, quail, coyotes, and a few more rattlers than we really wanted to see. It was an atmosphere conducive to an unhurried lifestyle which seemed well suited to portrayal by a simple pinhole camera.
Although pinhole photography is fundamentally simple, it did take some experimentation with equipment and technique to start getting the pictures I wanted that would reflect my perceptions of our desert home. I was helped some in making the transition from lens-based photography to the pinhole by the simultaneous exploration of picture making with old box cameras.
A well-made pinhole can produce and image which is often surprisingly close to what you would get from a good wide-angle lens. Of course, that only holds true if you get other aspects of the process right such as maintaining the camera adequately steady during a long exposure. Lighting conditions, relationships of foreground and background, and the choice of subjects also enter into the equation. Man-made objects which tend to be symmetrical, with well-defined edges and boundaries will often appear more sharply rendered in pinhole images than representatives of the world of nature.
So, There is a good deal more to producing satisfying pinhole images than just the issue of image resolution or sharpness. In fact it is a combination of the unique advantages of the pinhole such as great depth of field along with the process of producing such images which is crucial to the enterprise.
Making a pinhole image demands a slower and more engaged effort which encourages closer and more effective examination of everyday objects and the context in which they appear. It turns out the world is full of interesting perspectives and juxtapositions which are all around us and which the pinhole will reveal if given the chance.
In fact there are opportunities to explore pinhole phenomena in everyday life even without a pinhole camera. One needs only to open the mind to the possibility that such images exist and are waiting to be discovered.
I realized after briefly studying the pattern that it was a pinhole image projected through the keyhole of the bathroom door. What I saw was the large window in our east-facing front door and the four glass blocks in the transom at the top which were illuminated by the rising sun. The transom portion was at the bottom of the image because any image created by a pinhole is always inverted.
I repeated the experience recently. Holding my hand a foot from the keyhole, I was able momentarily to cradle the sunlit image in my palm.
The idea of flight has always held great appeal for me, though in different forms at different periods of my life. As a young man, I had recurrent dreams of flight. It was not the graceful, soaring flight of birds, but rather a strenuous arm-flapping effort which took me only a few feet off the ground. Perhaps because of the sensation of expending great physical effort I did not for some time realize that my mental images of flight were dreams; they seemed more like dim memories of real events. When I realized finally that I had only dreamed about flying and did not actually have the capacity for flight -- no matter how hard I flapped my arms -- the dreams ceased.
I began to think often again about flight during the years I lived in San Francisco. I walked regularly to the summit of Bernal Heights and spent many hours enjoying the marvelous views of the city, the Bay and the sky. Red Tail hawks and kestrels floated on the air currents around the Heights, and I developed a visceral connection to their fluid motion in space. I began to build kites -- Japanese and Indian fighters that I could manuver with a flick of the wrist and I percieved, perhaps somewhat wishfully, that the hawks were drawn to my dancing kites.
Longing for a closer connection to the hawks of Bernal Heights I began to study falconry. I first acquired and trained kestrels to stoop to a lure, and eventually I hunted jackrabbits with a Red Tail at the edge of the Bay off the east tip of San Bruno Mountain. The combination of success with my falconry and disallusion with city life led to a move to rural Idaho, The Snake River Canyon of southern Idaho was at that time the world capital of falconry where the secrets of the ancient tradition were revived to help save the great raptors from extinction.
To watch a falcon circle in the sky high overhead and then be able to summon it back to earth to perch again on my glove was really a dream made real. It was a marvelous experience, but an all-consuming one which left little time or energy for anything else, and I eventually had to put it all behind me.
Dreams of flight receded again to the dim corners of my mind for many years while I focused more on making a living and the needs of my family. It was only as I approached retirement that an interest in flight surfaced again, this time through the medium of photography.
Living in southern New Mexico I often visited the air museum near El Paso to take pictures of the planes, and I attended air shows and hot air balloon events. At the same time, I began to acquire a collection of old film cameras, many of which I used to make photos of aircraft. It was fun to try to match the age of the planes with the cameras to make pictures in which I tried to evoke earlier days of flight and image making.
Though I acquired and used many fine old cameras with lenses having superb resolution, the pictures of aircraft I ultimately found most satisfying were made with my pinhole camera. The wide-angle perspective of the pinhole along with the near-infinite depth of field revealed the kinship of the machines to insects, birds and winged dragons
In images of people made with a pinhole camera, surface details are suppressed and the underlying moving, changing ephemerality of life becomes manifest.
Pictures of people do not comprise a large portion of my photographic work, but I have made quite a few over the years, and I place a high value on the ones I believe to be successful in some way. I am not a very sociable person, and no one would describe me as gregarious. I suspect my interest in making portraits may be partly a response to my own underlying neuropsychological makeup.
Often when looking at the textured surface of a wall or chance designs on rough tiles, I find myself mentally composing images of faces from random patterns. They are never faces of people I know, but rather fantasy faces which sometimes combine animal and human features. Often, the images of faces are not immediately evident, but evolve as I look at them and perceive different possibilities for interpretation. Pinhole portraits evoke similar engagement.
The tradition of portraiture involves ideas of identity and self-presentation. There is always some negotiation between the photographer and the subject regarding these considerations, and at least an implied agreement as to the way the photographic images will be used.
The portraitist's aim is usually to achieve a desired objective of representation through a high level of control of all the circumstances of the portrait session, usually including an instantaneous exposure. The producer of pinhole images on the other hand must surrender some control and accept a degree of serendipity, the difference coming about primarily through the expansion of the time element in the exposure.
My idea in including people in a pinhole picture has more of the character of a performance in which the person is less a subject or model, but more a collaborator in the production of an image which is made primarily to explore the nature of pinhole imagery. Aspects of identity may be preserved in the final image, but they may also be totally obliterated.
The first generation of fixed-lens digital cameras were not very practical platforms for attaching a pinhole in place of a lens. Later developments of digital cameras with interchangeable lenses permit mounting a pinhole on body caps, but doing so creates a rather incongruous combination of high and low tech. Such matings of digital capabilities of lensless photography , while involving expenditures of hundreds or thousands of dollars, also at this point do not produce end results which are superior to those to be had from a pinhole in a paint can or a Quaker Oats container.
Local film processing and even local retail sources of film have largely disappeared in most places, but mail ordering both is still feasible. There is also the satisfying option of processing your own film at home with available kits which are simple to use and will produce a roll of negatives ready to scan or enlarge in about an hour.
Miniaturists often make use of snippits of 35mm film to load into matchbox pinhole cameras. At the other end of the scale, view camera enthusiasts load sheet film in 4x5 and larger film holders to produce pinhole images with extraordinary resolution and tonal qualities. A nice compromise between those extremes is 120 roll film which will tipically produce eight to sixteen exposures per roll and still permit moderate enlargement.
People have made pinhole cameras from every conceivable container; light tightness and a small hole are about the only real requirements. I chose to make mine from a modified folding camera, an old Agfa Billy Record that seemed unlikely to take pictures again due to a terminally deteriorated bellows. I cut out the bellows and associated hardware, hacksawed a hole in the front door panel where I fitted the shutter without the lens, and I added some adhesive-backed foamie material to prevent light leaks.
The pinhole is in a disk of thin metal laid in front of the shutter blades, and held in place by a foam-rubber washer. I originally had the pinhole located behind the shutter, but found that the front of the lens mount tube was causing quite a bit of vignetting of the image. I tried three different pinholes with this camera. One I made myself, one was a precision-drilled pinhole purchased from a fellow on ebay, and the last was a laser-drilled hole. They all gave me very similar results.
The camera is very convenient to use as it gives me eight big 6x9 frames on a roll of 120 film. The mechanical shutter with its cable release socket is a little easier to manage than.a single flap shutter that many put on pinhole cameras. The tripod mount permits attachment of a light-weight tripod with telescoping legs, and the whole kit fits easily into a small camera bag, usually along with a couple conventional film cameras and accessories.
The optical viewfinder on the top of my Billy pinhole camera shows only a small portion of the wide-angle view captured by the pinhole. However, the viewfinder does enable me to make a determination about where the center of the image will be located. Once that point is established, it is then necessary to keep in mind that the camera must be located much closer to the primary subject than the normal view through the finder suggests.
On a sunny day with 100 ASA/DIN film in the camera, opening the shutter for one or two seconds will produce a correct exposure. Bracing the camera securely on a solid surface for a second to get a motionless exposure is feasible, and sometimes the only way to get a picture when working close in on difficult terrain. When smooth ground is available, however, I always use my light-weight tripod to ensure steadiness. The tripod's reversible center post enables putting the camera right at ground level to provide the perspective I am often seeking.
Reviewers of the history of pinhole image production frequently note that the earlierst known examples of the camera obscura and the pinhole phenomenon are to be found in historical records passed down from the Greeks and Chinese, and that these accounts date back to perhaps a few thousand years. It needs to be noted , however, that those cited accounts are written records. While the invention of the camera obscura may not have greatly exceeded the invention of writing, an awareness of the pinhole phenomenon was most certainly a preliterate discovery.
It seems likely that our most distant human ancestors were aware of natural occurrences of projected pinhole images. People in preliterate societies with an economy based on hunting and gathering are extremely perceptive about their environments, and natural or accidental pinhole images are everywhere, and are particularly evident at the time of solar eclipses.
The ubiquity of naturaly occurring pinhole images may seem at first glance as counter-intuitive. I believe that is primarily because our surroundings in the modern world have become so cluttered that many natural phenomena are obscured. Our visual fields are awash in manufactured forms and textures, and we allow ourselves little time to contemplate the underlying natural interplay of light and shadow.
Of course the opportunities to observe accidental pinhole images are not evenly distributed throughout all habitable environments. Nevertheless, one can easily visualize scenarios in nature where the proper balance of natural light and projected pinhole images might be expected to occur.
Imagine, for instance, a cave entrance shaded by a grove of trees. Or, consider the architecture of the dwellings of tribal people in the Amazon Basin who learned to supplement hunting and gathering with seasonal slash-and-burn agriculture. Their dwellings were often walled with split wood staves and roofed with woven palm fronds, an inevitable source of pinhole apertures which would project images on the floors and walls of darkened interior spaces.
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