Pinhole Photography

Introduction

My interest in pinhole photography dates back to about 1986. Educated in the 70s as a Physicist and Engineer I was well aware of the pinhole camera, but more as a theoretical concept than a real thing. One day, while perusing an art museum gift shop, I discovered a book; 'The Visionary Pinhole' by Lauren Smith. It showed interesting photographs actually taken with pinhole cameras This led me to the Pinhole Journal and many other books and publications on the subject. Over the years I have built dozens of pinhole cameras and taken hundreds of photos with them. With this website, I don't intend to reproduce the countless descriptions of pinhole cameras and instructions for their design. Here I intend to describe how I have matched the elegance of the of the camera with similar elegance in physics and chemistry to produce better images.

Paper Negatives

The first thing to understand is that I use photographic enlarging paper as the film in my cameras. There are several reasons for this:

1. Pinhole cameras tend to have exposure times of about one second using photographic film in daylight. This is a tricky amount of time to consistently produce by hand. Imagine uncovering the hole and covering it back in only a second without a lot of time variation. Not to mention accidentally bumping the camera. Enlarging paper is much slower than film and the exposure times are about one hundred seconds. This is a much more manageable time to work by uncovering the hole and literally watching the clock.

2. Pinhole images tend to be rather soft focus. Taking a photograph using a small format like 35mm film and then enlarging it to get something more viewable results, in my humble opinion, a way too blurry image. Most decent looking pinhole photographs are taken where the negative is the same size as the final print and the bigger the better.

3. Today film is nearly impossible to purchase in large format sizes anyway.

4. Another big advantage is that with paper, all of the preparation and processing can be done in the darkroom using a red safe light.

There are some key differences in the processing of paper over film. Film development takes many minutes and must be done in a light tight tank. The objective is to create a negative with the widest dynamic range and finest grain possible. That way prints can be made that are larger than the negative and adjusted for exposure. Paper on the other hand is designed to develop in only a minute while in a shallow tray. That allows for quicker processing time as adjustments are tried to achieve the desired print.

Unfortunately, the multigrade paper that is readily available produces negatives that have a lot of contrast. Because pinhole photos tend to be a little soft focus, this contrast helps give the illusion of better resolution in some cases. However, I prefer to tinker with the exposure and contrast digitally after scanning in the negative. So, about half the time, I put a yellow (Y2 or #8) or green (X0 or #15), filter in front of the pinhole to shift the contrast of the paper.

Another thing about pinhole photography that I find attractive is the trapped-on-a-desert-island or MacGyver aspect of making a camera that actually works from practically nothing. But sadly you still end up needing to buy paper and chemicals from a store to use it. So far I haven't found an easy way to make my own paper, but the chemistry can be replaced with stuff you can buy at the grocery store.

More information on paper negatives here.

Some Examples