Pinhole perspective

Peyote pinhole camerafrom Corbis ReadyMech Cameras

Several years ago while visiting the street market at NYC’s Union Square Park I stumbled upon a photographer selling photos of city scenes. The images were uniquely different: Small (most not much more than 4 inches square), black and white, and slightly blurred, with many having a strangely skewed perspective. They had an attention grabbing, hand-crafted look to them.  The photo I eventually purchased was one of the Brooklyn Bridge taken with a pinhole camera. 

Pinhole photography allows you to make a photograph that requires only a light-tight container with a tiny hole in one side (as a camera) and any photo-sensitive surface in it. The pinhole camera is often hand-made from any available container (soda can, opaque plastic container, oatmeal box, etc.). The experience of image-making becomes a little more special and magical when created with a hand-made camera; the infinite depth-of-field, skewed perspectives, and slower exposures available with a pinhole camera create the potential for greater creativity in the finished image.

The photographer who made my Brooklyn Bridge picture used an empty 35mm film container.  He punched a tiny hole in the side, placed a single frame of unexposed 35mm film within, sealed the container, and placed it atop a piling on the shore of the East River, facing the bridge.  Here comes the interesting part: Since it’s difficult to accurately aim such a crude device, and exposure times are lengthy and variable, you never know exactly what quality of image you’ll end up with, until the photo is developed. 

“I can build a pinhole camera out of almost anything imaginable,” he told me. “It just takes imagination. The only problem is that film and the chemicals to develop it are harder to find and more expensive. Digital photography is rapidly taking over.”

It’s fortunate that the next Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is scheduled for April 27, 2008.  Pinhole Day is an international event created to promote and celebrate the art of pinhole photography.  According to Pinholeday.org:

On this unique day, we encourage people throughout the world to take some time off from the increasingly technological world we live in and to participate in the simple act of making a pinhole photograph, and to share their visions and help spread the unusual beauty of this historical photographic process.

To find out how you can become a part of WPPD, read the page on How to Participate.  And thanks to Corbis ReadyMech Cameras, you can download, print and build your own pinhole camera, designed exclusively with Corbis images and illustrations.  I’m told that making and using a pinhole camera is easy.  And these cameras are artworks in themselves.

Photos of Your Mother pinhole camera from Corbis ReadyMech Cameras

Apparently Corbis is not the first to design cut-out paper cameras.  The Dirkon, a Czechoslovak paper camera, was first published in 1979 in the magazine An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists for readers to cut out and make themselves. 

The Dirkon 

Googling “pinhole camera” returns a surprisingly large volume of hits.  Here are two:  Pinhole Visions: The Art of Pinhole Photography contains a directory of resources, discussion area, and galleries of pinhole photographs.  And for more examples of cameras and information on pinhole photography in general go to The Luminous Landscape.   

~TAB