Pinhole Photography

Background

Photography has always been of a lot of interest to me. Mainly because my father is a photographer and involved me from little with all the experiments he used to do.

I have been making pictures by myself since I’m about 15 years old. My collection of analogue cameras has grown, and includes a couple of nice models. My favourites are my Nikormat FT2 and my new (second hand) Leica R4.

At home, we have also build a small dark room. I have not developed negatives yet, but we have been printing photographs occasionally with different results. The constant here is the amount of fun we have experimenting and viewing pure magic in front of our eyes.

Last year I attempted to build a pinhole camera, following the simple instruction on www.matchboxpinhole.com.

Simple as the where, I did not manage to finish it. Many excuses for this, as I moved apartment in between and parts of the kit got lost or crushed in the bottom of a box. This summer, for my birthday, my girlfriend got me a kit to build a camera.

This weekend I made some time, and we went out to make the first series of pictures. This was an interesting excursion, as it was the first, and we found many things to change or improve in the whole process. I will keep listing these things I find below.

The Equipment

Pinhole camera

I am using the one from the kit I got, you can easily build one yourself. The advantage of the kit is that you can use normal 35mm film, and it contains sort of a film transport system.

Also the image proportions should be correct.

Light Meter

I have an old light meter that I got from my father. People on the street look worried, as the light-meter looks like a start-trek phaser.

Log-Book

It is important to write down what you do. Especially at the start of using a new camera. I am writing down the following details of each exposure:

No.	Object	Weather/Lighting conditions	Light meter Value	Exposure time	Remarks
1.	Tree	Sunny	1/500	1.5s.

Stuff to setup the camera

This sounds a bit weird, but due to long exposure times, you don’t want the camera to move. I use a small handful of Lego blocks to make sure I can put the camera somewhere more or less horizontal, and stable. To Do: Need to attach a tripod mount

Exposure Time

The time you need for an exposure is not exact science. You have to measure to elements of your camera(using the same measure):

The size of the pin hole – In my case: 0.7mm

The distance from the hole to the film – In my case: 55 mm

These numbers allow you to calculate your f-stop. The formula is:

Distance / hole diameter – 55/0.7 = 78

Now with this number, the f Stop, you can calculate exposure times. I suggest you either use the calculator tool on http://www.mrpinhole.com, print out a chart/wheel like this one: Dr.-Ing A. Irmer’s Exposure Value Extension disc or if you have a conventional light meter, use this conversion chart. For the first shoot I copied the table I made with the calculator of Mr. Pinhole. This week I’ll print out a Disc chart, to see if that works a bit easier.

First Shoot

The first shoot was good fun. We had no clue if where going in the right direction. We went to The Parc Güell in Barcelona, which is a beautiful place and has a lot of interesting spots to make pictures of.

The reactions of people on me walking around with a device that resembles something in between a star-trek phaser and a sonic screwdriver than any other modern technology known was great.

It was a half cloudy/sunny day, and light meter readings where all between 1/1000 and 1/250. Making the exposure times between 1-3 seconds.

We shot each picture at least twice. Using different exposure times. We already made some mistakes on our first shoot. some (unintentional) double exposures, and one where the shutter did not close well. You’ll see the pictures:)

UPDATE 07/04/2011

Ok, I finally managed to have the film developed. Good news. Everything is blurry!! Good news because I can guess where the blur is coming from; The shutter mechanism makes the whole camera move. The rest went pretty well… The pictures are spaced, a couple where double exposed but we did that on purpose and it looks like I had the light/time calculations spot on. I’ve had the film scanned and only a few pictures came through. I’ve placed them below here.

After a bit of reading, I did find that the lack of focus is not necessarily due to the movement of the shutter while making the photo, but can also come through the size and quality of the hole. Here’s a good text that explains that: http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholecameras/pinhole_01.html

I’ll be working on some of the modifications I thought about and listed below.

UPDATE 16/04/2011

Last weekend I changed the pinhole which was made from a piece of tinfoil to a piece of soda can. The hole I made with a needle and looked really nice. Good edges and 0.7mm Diameter. We went up to our building roof with a couple of paymobile and Lego figs. and shot a film.

I´ve already picked up the pictures from the shop and added a galery below. As you can see the pictures are still very blurry. The colors look a lot better now though.

This morning I again, made a new pinhole plate. I´ve re-calculated the Focal length and saw that the hole needed to be a lot smaller, about 0.3mm.  The new plate is mounted and I´ll shoot some pictures next week. Due to the new size, I also had to re-calculate the exposure times that now are a bit longer.

The First Series – Parc Guell

Barcelona View

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The Second Series – My Roof

pinhole-playmobil-love

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Here are all the articles on my Pinhole Adventures:

Pinhole

• Something Negative Becomes Positive
• Something Negative Becomes Positive
• LEGO Mindstorms Pinhole Camera Video
• The Mindstorms Pinhole Camera - First Test
• The Mindstorms Pinhole Camera - First Test
• The Mindstorms Pinhole Camera
• The Mindstorms Pinhole Camera
• Second Film Ready…. Still blurry
• Second Film Ready…. Still blurry
• The First Pinhole Modifications
• The First Pinhole Modifications
• Pinhole page updated
• Pinhole page updated
• New Page added, Pinhole Adventures!
• New Page added, Pinhole Adventures!
• Finishing Template
• Quiet Day's
• !!Happy 2008!!
• Waiting....