Getting Back to Basics

Before the lens came the aperture. The very first camera, the camera obscura or “dark box”, is nothing more than an aperture on one side of a light-tight box. The camera doesn’t get much more basic than that. Hence, my fascination for pinhole photography. If you can take a compelling photograph with a pinhole camera, you can take a picture with just about anything.

Color photo taken with a homemade pinhole camera on 4x5 film

Pinhole Photography really makes you think about the image you’re capturing, not the equipment you’re capturing it with. There’s only one setting to master; time. But there’s so much to be learned—patience! With time and patience, you can capture an image using a box with a hole in it. With time, patience and thought, you can create a photograph.

Being a completely different medium than film, digital photography requires almost no time and patience to capture an image. But to create a digital photograph, you need just as much if not more thought. The good news is once you get to know your equipment, the thought goes into the making of the photograph, and not the process of capturing the image.

Color photo taken with a Nikon D90 and Lensbaby Composer/Pinhole optic.

Pinhole photography lends itself well to the digital medium. It requires just as much time, patience and thought as its film-based counterpart, but affords more potential for free experimentation. The experience gained can then be applied to capturing pinhole images on film, with a much greater resolution.

I find the softness of pinhole photos intriguing. To me, they’re not exactly out of focus; they’re out of time. Because they can depict extended periods of time in a single frame, they seem to come from a different dimension. Even sharp pinhole photos taken in large format with an optimally-sized aperture have a quality I cannot quite describe.

So, now that I have a digital camera with an interchangeable lens that I can replace with a pinhole, I can become truly prolific in my pinhole work. With no reciprocity failure, the exposure time has been substantially shortened. With no color shifts, color pinhole photography becomes much more feasible. Under the right conditions, I can even do it handheld. The need to compare it with its film counterpart will no doubt resurrect my interest in 4x5 pinhole.

But, I will need a remote cable release (which is now wireless, of course) so there’s another thing to order.