to pinhole or not to pinhole

I loaded some Fuji 200 color into my point-and-shoot pinhole and took a walk in the neighborhood.  It was the first time in quite a while that I had made pinhole images.

My new truck, a '96 Toyota T100 4WD. 

I thought I might use up the roll in a couple sessions, but I was surprised to find that I had all twenty-four frames accounted for in about an hour.

I spent about a year shooting mostly pinhole some time ago.  I used a medium format camera and shot only black and white.  I was pleased with my results in the end, but also felt I had reached my limits with the medium and went back to shooting my regular old film cameras.

In evaluating my work with the pinhole, I discovered that the things I liked about the images were mostly not unique to pinhole cameras or technique.  Most of the effects could also be accomplished with cameras with lenses: small apertures, great depth of field, extreme wide angle, diffraction flare, low-angled perspective, near-far effects, motion blur.  In fact, a lot of that showed up in images made with the little Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim with which I have made a lot of pictures.

Still, pinhole brings all those things together, and it is fun to try to bring it under control and to make it all work effectively.  It is also a good way to learn a lot of technique that carries over into lens-based photography.

Pinhole also has the virtue of producing unexpected and surprising results even when you think you have all the variables accounted for.  It can lead you into exciting and unexplored territory.

Every pinhole camera I have worked with has its own quirks, and it takes some time to learn how to aim and compose with some confidence.  Exposure in good daylight is pretty simple; one second gets it about right for me nearly every time.  In low light, the game gets trickier as films vary considerably in their capacity to record images with very long exposure times.

Part of the reward of pinholing is making your own equipment.  It can be as simple as a matchbox and a bit of foil.  However, using a real camera body can facilitate the process quite a bit as that takes care of film transport, light tightness, and can even provide an easy-to-operate shutter.

Perhaps the main advantage of shooting pinhole is that it lets you put aside preconceptions of how images should be made or how they should look.  It frees you to have fun and learn at the same time.

Area 51

Frequent visitors will recognize the pictures as coming from Albuquerque's National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. It is a subject which I have nearly beaten to death, but I found myself there recently again with my little plastic pinhole in my pocket, so I felt compelled to record the event. The last shot was the inspiration for the post title, and most closely approaches my stylistic aspirations for the camera.

Back at the Zoo

I took the new 35mm point-and-shoot pinhole camera for a walk through the zoo today. I just braced it against any handy surface for the exposures, and I thought it did quite well. The camera was the easiest conversion to a pinhole that I've done and it is fun to shoot.

Pinhole at the Zoo

New Pinhole

I've been wanting to try some pinhole pictures with a somewhat different style than I have done in the past. The little plastic point & shoot cameras are a good choice to convert for pinhole use. The camera case is simply disassembled , and the simple shutter and lens can be easily removed to make way for the pinhole. This particular camera has a couple more things to recommend it for pinhole use. The lens mount where the pinhole disk goes is close to the front of the camera, so there is no vignetting of the image by the round lens opening. The paddle lens cover is actuated by the pressing of the shutter button, thus giving a relatively smooth release. For maximal sharpness, one would want an optimally sized pinhole, and also the addition of a tripod mount to steady the camera on exposure. Since I was going for a more impressionistic style, I decided to just use some rubber bands to secure the camera to the top of my tripod, and I even shot it hand-held part of the time.

Pinhole Color

Color These are the first color pinhole images I've made. The camera is a plastic 35mm Vivitar PN2011 with the lens replaced by a home-made pinhole following instructions provided by Ross Orr. I always feel getting any kind of image on the first roll in such an undertaking has to be counted as a success. I do have a few things to do yet, though. In most of the pictures, a large part of the frame was occupied by my right forefinger, so I need to figure out a better way of tripping the shutter. The uncropped version of these photos show quite a bit of vignetting due to the intrusion of the lens mount. On the plus side, the exposure was pretty good throughout. Back to the drawing board.