April 27 was International Pinhole Day. Note that I wrote PinHOLE not PinHEAD (I read somewhere that Pinhead Day is the 29th). How many of you got your pinhole cameras out? I missed it, but better late than never. A great example of pinhole can be seen here. It's a flickr group for pinhole that really inspires me to try it. This person has beautiful work.
I've been interested in Pinhole photography for a while. I've seen some amazing work on the internet and a friend of mine has done some nice work with a pinhole she made on a body cap and attached to her 35mm.
I had a summer project in mind when I went home last year. I wanted to build a pinhole camera with my Dad. I did lots of research with it but he just gave me a strange look and slowly backed away when I mentioned it. I think he has other plans for his retirement.
After doing quite a bit of research on the pinhole camera, I decided that the pinhole I'd really like is the Zero Image 6x9. I don't have a few hundred dollars to spend so I had to look elsewhere. I thought about using my holga to do pinhole but opted not to mess with my Holga anymore than I have. It might have been cheaper to make my own but after looking at various plans and realizing I would have to buy most of the stuff to make one I wasn't sure. And I wanted to have some fairly consistant results and not have so much human error in the mix at this point.
Eventually, I found that Kenko filters has a pinhole bodycap that is painted glass with a small hole etched into it. I tried to find a better link but only came up with this one for a store in Tokyo. The kenko filter needs an adaptor for the 35mm SLR but it seemed to be the cheapest option with the least room for me to screw it up.
It seems the biggest challenge for good pinhole photography is to get the hole uncovered without shaking the box or tin that the paper or the film is in. Yay, cable release! It was also nice to use my film camera. I haven't used it too much since I bought my digital SLR. I suppose technically, since the body cap is not open air, I could stick it onto my digital. I read some blogsand it seems that opinions vary. I think that pinhole really needs the vagaries of film to really make it shine.
It rained most of today and when the sun finally peeked out, I packed up my gear and took 20 shots of black and white film using my pinhole 35mm. Now if I were a pinhole camera, what would I be able to see? This the part that sucks, and is also the beauty when you get it right. It's like a crap shoot. The framing is really hard because there is nothing to see in the view finder. Next time, I will sketch what I think I took a picture of and compare it to what I got. I hoped to use up the whole film but it got to dark and when I calculated that an exposure would take over an hour it was time to go home.
Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny so I will use up the rest of the film and maybe shoot a roll of color slide or color negative. I won't get results back for a while since it's Golden Week and my film store is closed until Wednesday.