Pinhole

Years ago an artist friend of mine introduced me to pinhole (lensless) photography. After seeing some of his photos, I was instantly enamored with this photographic process. How simple the camera was with very few knobs and dials to operate. All you really need is a container that’s black inside that you can make light tight, a tiny pinhole aperture, some 35mm or 120 roll film or photographic paper and a shutter. The possibilities of what you can make a camera out of is only limited to your imagination. People have made pinhole cameras out of cars, eggs, cigar boxes, Altoid mint tins, oatmeal cans, shoeboxes, matchbooks, SPAM cans (SPAMera), business cards, old rusty cans, coffee cans, tea tins, the list goes on and on.

Soon I was making my own homemade cameras and experimenting with what kind of images I could produce with them. Since there isn’t a viewfinder you have to imagine in your mind’s eye what the image will look like before you take it. Keeping in mind that pinhole photographs have a very small aperture (like f/200) compared to most conventional camera that only go down to f/22. This enables you to get subject matter in focus really close and far from the camera in focus. And since the aperture is so small this requires the photographer to keep the shutter open for longer periods of time to properly expose the film or paper. Long exposures create motion blur which gives the image a dreamlike look and feel, which I think adds to the aesthetic of the image. I enjoyed making cameras that didn’t have lenses so much, I wrote a book about it called Pinhole Cameras; a Do-It-Yourself Guide, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2011.