A pinhole camera is lensless camera. It is a light-tight box (or other light-tight
object) with a very fine round hole in one end, and film or photographic paper
in the other. Light passes through the hole and image is formed in the camera.
Pinhole cameras can be found in history going back to the
4th century BC. In the 5th
century Chinese teachers discovered that light travels in straight lines, and a
philosopher called Mo Ti recorded an inverted image with a pinhole. It was also found in the 10th
century that eclipses could be recorded without damage to a person’s eyes. In North Africa nomadic tribes who lived in
tents made from animal skins found that a pinhole in the tent would show
beautiful scenes from outside.
In the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci also
recorded in his notebooks about how “images of illuminated objects pass through
a small round hole into a very dark room…you will see on paper all those
objects in their natural shapes and colours.”
There was a recent television program on Fox about Da Vinci that
actually showed Da Vinci using a camera obscura, although the subject matter
was not too pleasant.
It was not until men like Daguerre, Niepce, and Hershel
came along that the process of photography enabled for images to be fixed, and
this led to the development of photography.
Sir David Brewster was an English scientist who was one
of the first to make pinhole photographs. It was in his 1850′s book "The
Stereoscope" that the word "pin-hole" was first used. Another
Englishman Flinders Petrie, an archeologist in the 1880′s, who during his
excavations in Egypt took many pinhole photographs that he exhibited in London museums.
Pinhole cameras have infinite depth of field and everything
from the closest object to the most distant object is in the same relative
focus. Objects at a far distance will be less sharp due to particles in the
atmosphere. A pinhole shows a scene just as the eye sees it. Pinhole cameras
give a soft focus to images, and tend to show a lot of fall off. With pinhole cameras you don’t have to worry
about f-stops etc. You just have to
expose the film or photographic paper and you will then reproduce an image.
The film or photographic paper has to be loaded into the
pinhole camera in a darkroom. With
photographic paper, you can load this in a darkroom with a red light. You can then take your camera, focus on your
subject, expose your pinhole camera for the necessary amount of time, and then
you proceed to process the film or paper.
Justin Quinnell
Justin Quinnell is a freelance pinhole photographer and
part-time lecturer from Bristol in the UK. He did a degree in fine art
photography and discovered pinhole some 20 years ago.
He has been employed as the head of a photography
department, he currently lectures at universities around the UK, and is the artist
in residence at Knowle West Media Centre having distributed 450 solargraph
cameras to the community.
He has 2 books published and was ‘pinhole photography
consultant’ for the Rachel Weisz (Rachel
Weisz’ sister Minnie Weisz is also a well know pinhole photographer) movie –
The Brothers Bloom.
This link shows an image of a 6 month solar graph.
Here are some instructions from Justin on producing a
pinhole, taken from his video on his website.
For this you will need an aluminum beer can, 5”x7” light
sensitive photographic paper (not digital photographic paper)(this can be
ordered online).
You need to take the lid of the can with a can opener
(instructions on how to do this safely are on another video). You then need to clean and dry the can.
You need an A4, 210mm piece of thick black card. You need to cut the card to the diameter of
the can. You then cut notches down the card
and fold over. You cut a “bad
circle”. This will eventually give you a
light tight cap.
Use “Gaffer” tape, tear it and fold card around the base
and tape. Do not tape the card to the
can. Put the “badly cut” circle on top
and “Gaffer” tape it in place. Don’t
just tape straight across, do it at an angle, so as to not use too much tape,
but still make light tight. The lid
comes off and you now have a light proof can.
Use a pin to make the hole. Push the pin horizontally to make the
hole. Push the pin in and then pull it
out. The hole will be 1-1 ½ mm. Now to make the light proof shutter. Get some black electrical tape. Cut a piece
off and fold it back on itself leaving a little sticky bit. Put the sticky bit over the hole.
Put the light sensitive photographic paper, 5”x7”, not
glossy as this reflects causing lines (this can be ordered online). As you are exposing the paper for 6 months
you can almost put the paper into the can in normal lighting, not
sunlight. Make sure that the gap in the
paper is opposite where the pinhole is.
Feel for the pinhole. Put the lid
on. Now this is light tight.
Light sensitive papers goes dark when light touches
it. (JQ puts a reel of electrical tape
onto the light sensitive paper to show an example.)
He says that it rather like getting a sun tan, in that it
gets darker over 10 minutes, and then he takes the tape off it shows the reels
image (or where the reel was placed).
The light etches an image onto the paper in the pinhole.
Seal the camera. Seal
the lid with “Gaffer” tape. Make it
waterproof. Use the image stabilization,
and attach the instruction sheet.
You can make a pinhole out of a camera film pot. For this you make a hole in the camera film
pot, use a bit of aluminum from a can, put a small hole in this, (not as big as
the previous one).
Removing the camera.
When removing the camera there may be condensation, so dry with a hair
dryer under darkish lighting.
Then again under darkish lighting put the image onto your
flatbed scanner fairly quickly and then simply scan. DON’T PREVIEW the image. Scan at 400-600 DPI in colour. This is because the image at present is a
pinky brown and when you invert the image it will become blue, just like the
sky.
Once scanned return to the can so the image is safe and
in a light tight environment.
You then end up with a negative image that you scanned
into the computer.
Digitally edit the image by inverting the image, and
adjusting where necessary.
You DO NOT process the image at all. No chemicals are used, which is good for
schools etc.
Develop the image and it will go BLACK. Fix the image and it will wash away.
Minnie Weisz
Minnie Weisz is the younger sister of actress Rachel
Weisz, but in her own right she is a photographer and curator. She studied at the Royal College of Art, and
the London College of Printing.
She has done a series of photographs of rooms in the
empty 1854 Great Northern Hotel in London, and she has turned the spaces into
giant pinhole cameras.
She is fascinated by north London, and she produced a
book and exhibition called Eye Dream. It
featured a series of photographs of “romantic, redolent emptiness and dignified
decay inside the mid-19th-century Fish and Coal building”. “The
magic moment was at Fish and Coal”, “After I was there for 5 days I realised I
was in a camera. I was there, with my
camera, in a camera.”
To facilitate this, she has to black out all the windows
with paper, and make a pinhole. “You are
then inside a camera, with the image of the outside projected in it. You can then see people walking over the
ceiling.”
Here you will find examples of Minnie Weizs’ pinhole photography.There are many contemporary photographers who use a variety of objects to make pinhole cameras. Kenny Bean has modified a wheelie bin that he then transports around to different parts of Edinburgh and takes images.
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