pinhole pt. 1

pinhole photography is usually thought of as just something you "did in a photography class in high school" - something used merely as a learning tool to teach photographic principles and some of the history behind photography.

fortunately this isn't all it's good for.

so why use a slow, labor intensive method of photography in our digital age? a well-built pinhole camera with a carefully crafted (or laser-drilled) pinhole can take very high quality pictures. pinhole cameras can even be designed to take pictures that just can't be taken with regular cameras.

since pinhole cameras don't have lenses they have infinite depth of field - everything in front of the pinhole is equally in focus. also, since you are most likely making your own camera (they can also be purchased online) you can modify the film plane in any way you want to. a good example of this is having a curved back on the camera. i built a camera out of a section of 10 inch pvc pipe that holds 3 pieces of 4x5 inch film to form a sort of panoramic tryptich (here's a drawing of the camera). it has a whopping 150 degree view. the train picture in my blog header above was taken with this camera.

here's a picture of the gallivan center in salt lake city that was also taken with this camera.



here's another pinhole image that i took with a regular old 150 mm pinhole camera with 4x5 film. it's a staircase in the joseph fielding smith building at byu - looking up.


unfortunately if you're looking for crystal clear pictures then pinhole photography may not be for you. the images have a softer feel because the pinhole isn't able to focus the objects perfectly. however, this softness can also add to the aesthetic of the picture. if you're going for a sharper pinhole image you can use a larger type of film - like 4x5 inch sheet film - and the details will be a lot sharper.

it's definitely an exciting experience building a camera from scratch that actually takes new and exciting pictures.

as for pinhole pt. 2, i plan on making a camera obscura and photographing the image cast on the wall. for those of you who didn't have that high school photography class, a camera obscura (literally dark room) is a completely darkened room with a small hole at one end. the scene on the other side of the hole is projected (upside down and backwards) onto the opposite wall. it's basically the precursor to the camera. pretty exciting...

scanography pt. 1

have you ever thought to use a scanner as a camera? truthfully i hadn't until i stumbled upon "scanography" on the internet. basically it's using a scanner to take pictures of objects. usually scanners are used to scan images and pictures, etc. but then you're limited by the resolution of the image that your scanning. you don't get much more than a digital copy of your picture that's been degraded by being enlarged.

so what if you scan something that isn't limited by resolution - the closer you look the more detail you see. i tried this with some japanese maple leaves in the fall last year. the result is a high resolution image that i could print out at 40 inches wide.



this technique can also be used with 3d objects - check out dawn campbell's flower scans for some examples.

as for pt. 2 of this post... i'm hoping that in the near future i can try out another branch of scanography - using the scanner as an actual camera by placing a light tight box on the scanner with one of my large format lenses on the front of it. because of how the scanner captures images (with a moving bar) anything that is moving in the scene will be distorted depending on how it's moving.

take a look at this site for some examples (those are cars in the street on the bottom right).