Pinhole Photography
When I got my 4×5 camera, I decided that it would be an easy “in” for pinhole photography; instead of having to build an entire pinhole camera, all I would have to do is build a lensboard that would fit in my large format camera, but with a pinhole instead of a lens. Even with a real camera at my disposal, I managed to screw it up by not making sure the film-holder was tight against the back of the camera. The below shot shows what happens when there is a light leak for about 3 seconds on a 40 second exposure.
A failed attempt at a pinhole image
Pinhole photography is kind of fun because there is something oddly satisfying about taking a picture without a lens — especially when there are lenses that are thousands of dollars! Of course the quality of the images cant really be compared but that is not the point… ;). I did manage to get some fairly sharp pinhole images using aluminum from a popcan, sanded down to thin the material. After the material is thin enough, one can just poke a hole through the aluminum with a pin (I use a beading needle as these have some of the smallest diameters). I found it helps to sand the hole lightly after with a high grit sand paper, I even used a polishing strop and rubbed the pinhole on this to make things super smooth (probably a bit extreme). I then pushed the pin through the hole again to clean out any polish and help make sure the hole was perfectly circular. The result was a pinhole of about 0.3-4 mm diameter which can make fairly sharp pinhole images!
A successful Pinhole Exposure! 110 seconds with Ilford FP4 Film.
The exposure durations are a gift and a curse…on the really long ones you don’t have to worry about how you uncover the pinhole (the time it takes to put a darkslide in and out of a film holder doesn’t make much of a dent in a 110 second exposure). On the 13 second exposure below, I covered the pinhole with my finger before removing the darkslide, then removed my finger for the exposure, recovered the pinhole, and then reinserted the darkslide. These durations are sweet for photographs of waterfalls.
Waterloo Gristmill - My first ever pinhole image!
The above photo was fairly low contrast, so when I upped the image contrast in post processing, the film grain really revealed itself.
Some pinhole exposures can be painfully long - I managed to get the exposure time for the image below down to 1 hour and 47 minutes. Indoor low light photography is not ideal for pinhole stuff that is for sure.
A picture of a staple remover eating a banana. EV 9 at ISO 100, which yielded an exposure duration of 1 hour and 47 minutes for the 0.33 mm pinhole at 80mm from the film plane.
One nice thing about using a pinhole in a large format camera is that you can change the field of view by moving the bellows of the camera in and out. The exposure of 1 hour and 47 minutes was achieved only by bringing the pinhole closer to the film plane (increasing field of view and making it more “wide”), if I shot how I originally wanted to crop the image, the exposure time would have been a few months due to the reduced effective aperture size (f/stop= distance to film/ pinhole diameter). The drastic increase in exposure times is mainly due to reciprocity failure of the film. For the pinhole shots posted, I curve fit the reciprocity failure data from Ilford using a 2nd order polynomial, which I then used to extrapolate for exposure times greater than 175 seconds. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but it worked quite well for the nearly 2 hour exposure I made.
Anyway, I think I am done with my exposures > 1 hour for now (though I would like to set something up that would go for months using a cracker tin or something!)… but until then I think I am back to the lenses.
