My partner Sharon grew up learning about photography the old fashioned way. For her it started with a pinhole camera as a school science experiment and then later through the use of film and developing in the dark room.

Me – well I am of the new generation. Whilst I can claim to have used 35mm film in a point and shoot camera when I was younger, I have never set foot in a darkroom – let alone dipped my grubby little fingers in the chemicals. My experience with photography has predominantly been digital, with Photoshop as my darkroom and the closest chemical involved in my development process being the occasional glass of Whiskey.

Sharon came across a toy plastic pinhole camera that can be loaded with 35mm film, which she gave to me as a gift. So, I set out on to create some images with the most basic form of camera there is – the Pinhole!

Long story short, I discovered that using a pinhole camera is complicated, especially when you are used to the instant feedback of digital.

Problem #1 – no LCD screen and no light meter.

Oh no. This means taking light readings and figuring out my exposure. Hmm. I don’t own a light meter! Solution? using my DSLR to get a light reading.

I quickly discovered that using a pinhole camera was going to involve a lot of math.

Problem #2 –Figuring out the aperture.

My pinhole camera has a piece of tinfoil in which I created the pin hole. The aperture is calculated as the focal length divided by the diameter of the pinhole.

f = (focal length /diameter)

In my case, the focal length was 50mm (the distance from the pin hole to the film), and the diameter of the pin hole was about 0.5mm – and when I say “about”, this infers some rather poor measurement. Lacking any instrument that can measure anything smaller than 1mm I was just taking my best guess at this.

With a bit of complicated mathematical crunching I divided 50 by 0.5 and arrived at my very roughly calculated aperture of f/100. Yikes! Holy dark matter batman – fast film required!

I popped down to the local camera shop and acquired a roll of Kodak 36 exposure ISO400 black and white film and I was ready to go.

Problem #3 – Exposure

I found a useful table to help me figure out the exposure for a pinhole camera. To figure out my exposure I set the DSLR to ISO400 (to match the speed of my film) and f/16 as a reference aperture. By taking a meter reading using my DSLR I was then was able to use the table below to figure out the corresponding shutter speed for f/100.

Most of the exposures I took were outside in the sun and required an exposure of around 2-5 seconds.

I grabbed an old tripod that we have at home for stability and for extra vintage flavour grabbed out my pocket watch to help me keep accurate time. Whilst my calculation of apertures and exposure times may have been a little rough, my time keeping was spot on.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out and was about to run out the door and start taking pinhole pictures I discovered something called reciprocity failure.

Problem #4 – Reciprocity Failure

The way film is exposed varies over time – so the exposure time required grows exponentially as the exposure time gets longer. Somewhere on the interweb I found this rough guide to calculating reciprocity failure.  Bah! More math.

Putting it all into practice

Finally I was all mathed up and I was armed and dangerous. With my DSLR to take light readings, pen and paper with relevant tables and charts to help me figure out my exposure and tripod and stopwatch at the ready I headed out to take pictures.

Bracket baby

I bracketed every shot that I took. Despite all my excellent and very *cough* accurate math, I was not confident that anything was going to come out exposed. So, for every frame I also took a second shot with a longer exposure time – just in case.

Ready. Steady. Aim… aim?

One of the more challenging problems I had was framing up the picture. My super awesome math had told me the focal length of my pinhole was 50mm. This is not very wide and the view finder on the pinhole left much to be desired.

All of the pictures consisted of me positioning the camera on something solid and pointing the pinhole in a rather general direction, and hoping for the best. As you can see by the results my aim was a little off.

The end results

In the end all my shots came out exposed. The slightly longer exposures were better, but there wasn’t much difference between them.

Overall the images we much blurrier than I expected, but really who was I kidding? I poked a hole in a bit of tinfoil… so I can hardly have expected to get images comparable to a modern camera.

Apparently the roundness and precision of the pin hole affects sharpness, and a smaller hole will also (apparently) provide a slightly sharper image. I will have to be more precise with my pinhole creation next time!

Looking on flickr I can see that it is possible to get some quite impressive results on a pinhole camera.

What I wanted to capture

This image was a grab shot on my 5D that I used to calculate  my exposure for one of the shots. I have done some work in post to make it sepia and added some grain and vignetting for that ‘authentic’ pinhole look:

Below is the pinhole version of the same shot – I wasn’t far off!

As fun as pinhole photography is, I think I will stick to my DSLR. Special thanks to Sharon for letting me take pinhole photos of her whilst she was all glammed up.

Worldwide pinhole day

Worldwide Pinhole day is coming very soon – this weekend in fact! So why not get creative and make yourself a pinhole camera and see what you can create.

Roll your own

If you are so inclined, here are some great links on how to make your own pinhole camera out of a beer can, a match box, or whatever else you might have to hand. I think the matchbox one looks awesome and creates a nice wide angle view – might have to try that next time!

How to build a matchbox pinhole camera with step by step pictures on how to do each step. This will teach you how to make a pinhole camera out of a matchbox that will take 35mm film.

Beer can pinhole camera with full assembly instructions.

Or, how about a SPAMera, a pinhole camera made out of a SPAM can.