Pinhole Photography (2003)
On a recent visit to the home of our friends, award winning cartoonist and illustrator, Jennifer Berman, her husband, graphic designer Matt Minde, and their marvelous baby son, Joseph, my daughter Zoe and I were privileged to see some recent work by one of Jen and Matt's friends, Dennie Eagleson. Dennie is a professor of photography at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and has been exploring the possibilities of pinhole photography.
The basic idea of projecting an image by having light pass through a small opening is quite old, noted by Aristotle in the 4th Century BC and in Chinese texts even earlier. The first pinhole photographs date from the 1850's. Pinhole images are softer than those formed by a lens, with great depth of field. Dennie's work is beautifully composed, by turns vibrant with movement and quietly meditative. You'll have to take my word for it; I don't think any of it is currently posted on the web.
Dennie gave me some information on pinhole photography and I came home resolved to give it a try. I read a few articles online, including "Pinhole Photography - History, Images, Cameras, Formulas" by Jon Grepstad, which is a great place to start learning about the subject. After a little head scratching and calculation, I decided to transform an old, lazy-shuttered Ciroflex medium format twin lens reflex camera I had in the basement into my pinhole instrument. I removed both the front and rear taking lens elements, but I left the shutter mechanism in. I did this because the shutter has both a "B" (bulb) and "T" (time) setting, which I thought would be useful for the longer exposures pinhole cameras require, and more convenient than manually uncovering and covering the hole to make an exposure. I ordered a laser-drilled pinhole from Lenox Laser of an appropriate size (.4mm diameter) - Jon's article has some charts correlating film to hole distance with optimal hole diameters. I calculated my camera would have an effective f ratio of 222, meaning I would shoot an exposure of approximately 250 times the duration of one shot at f16.
When the pinhole arrived in its mount, I epoxied it to a rubber washer that fit very snugly into the space previously occupied by the front lens element. It looked light tight to me, and the results have been good; I think I will apply some caulk around the edges of the washer, though.
I loaded some Fuji NPH 400 print film into the camera and started shooting. I'm comfortable shooting print film without a meter, basing my exposures on the "sunny 16" rule.* With print film's wide exposure latitude, it's prettty easy. I got a few shots I liked on that first roll. My favorite, of a passing elevated train, is posted here. It's about a two second exposure, with the camera held against a window sill. I scanned the negative on an Epson 2450 scanner and cropped and "spotted" it in Photoshop.
Encouraged, I decided to get a pinhole body cap to fit my Olympus OM system cameras, as I tend to carry one of them around much of the time. I bought a cap on Ebay from a seller called "pinholebilly." He sent the cap right away, and I used it to take a few shots on a roll of Fuji Velvia 50 I had in my OM-2n. I was taking pictures in a sculpture garden that stretches for several miles along McCormick Boulevard from Chicago into Evanston. The shot here, a juxtaposition of a sculpture and an electrical tower, was a two second exposure also, with the camera on the ground angling up toward the sculpture. I scanned it on a Nikon Coolscan IV and resized it (no other processing) in Photoshop.
Using these pinhole cameras is great fun; you can't tell exactly what you're going to get in the frame, reciprocity effects come into play, and finding subjects that lend themselves to the soft focus, long exposure times and extended depth of field is challenging and stimulating.
Addendum 2008: My pinhole images are displayed here and here. My intro to pinhole photography with a digital SLR is here.
*The sunny 16 rule is an easy method for guessing exposure without a meter. In bright sunlight, a proper shutter speed at f16 is the reciprocal of the film speed. For example, with 100 speed film, one would shoot a subject in bright sunlight at f16 with a shutter speed of 1/100 (1/125 on most cameras). For the Ciroflex pinhole, I was shooting 400 speed film at f222, so my bright sun exposure time was 1/400 * 250, or about half a second.