Pinhole photography

Before I started playing with Infrared Photography, I had been experimenting with Pinhole Photography. It dates back to the origins of photography when the light from the subject was not collected by a lens, but by a very small hole on the front of the camera - a pinhole-. There are a lot of resources to learn about this technique, for example The Pinhole Gallery or this tutorial from PhotoNet among others.

One of my pinhole cameras is a 4x5 camera from a kit sold by Bender Photographic . Somehow I liked the combination of this older technique with the use of film plates. And besides, this gives me the advantage of having a negative with a size of 4 by 5 inches, so I didn't have to worry about enlarging the image. The picture shows the camera I built; the round hole in the middle is not the pinhole per se. There is a metal plate attached to the round hole that is the one that holds the pinhole.

Changing how that the middle wooden part is connected to the body of the camera, we change the distance betwe

en the pinhole and the film; something similar to the focal distance in regular photography. In the picture on the left is also possible to see the thin piece of metal that has the pinshole in it.

A single sheet of film goes inside the film holder on the back. Actually, each film holder has two sheets of film, one on each side. This allows for two pictures before having the remove the exposed film and load new film. Of course, it has to be in total darkness and somehow it is not that easy.

Part of the attractionf of pinhole photography is that it is hard to know in advance how the picture will come out. For one, there is no visor or viewfinder. Also, the wider angles typical of pinshole photography makes it hard to imagine how the picture will come out. If it comes out at all, that is. Because we have to guesstimate exposure times that range from several seconds to few minutes.

A couple of examples of pictures that I took with this camera. These images are from directly scanning the negatives that I developed myself:

Because of the absurdly high f number, the image in pinhole photography has a large zone in which is in focus. The softness of the image is also typical from pinhole photography.

Also, the objects closer to the camera appear distorted in their own way, typical in this type of photography.

Not bad considering that it is a camera without a lens, huh?