a little more pinhole

here are a couple more pinhole photographs for your enjoyment...


this is an old abandoned office next to where i worked during college - it was pretty trashed on the inside and kind of falling apart in some places. for some reason i'm fascinated by old abandoned structures. seeing them is like talking to someone from an older generation - they have stories and experiences that you can't find anywhere else.


this is another picture taken with my panoramic pinhole camera. this is the sun setting over the beach at ocean shores, washington. i took this while on a road trip with a good friend. this was our first stop in washington on our way up to seattle. beautiful place.

this next photograph isn't a pinhole image but rather a picture i took to help demonstrate how images get flipped upside down and backwards when they pass through a pinhole or a lens.


the image is passing through one of my large format lenses and being projected onto the wall.

one more thing - during my last semester of college i had a technical writing class. for my final project i wrote a manual on how to build and use your own pinhole camera. so if you already have a basic knowledge of photography and you'd like to make and use your own here's a link to a pdf version of my manual. look for the box with the link that says "click here to start download".

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...