Putting a pin in it…
And now for something completely different…
As part of our History subject last year we built our own pinhole camera, one of the simplest forms of capturing an image on paper you can possibly imagine…. well sort of. A pinhole camera in essence is a light tight box with a tiny hole the size of a pinhead, hence the name, and on the opposite end is a holder for a piece of light sensitive paper. As such we all created our own pinhole camera with pre-cut black foam-core board, cloth tape, pins, and some velcro to cover the aperture.
The idea is that we put in a piece of paper in the dark room, go outside and “line up” a shot (no view finder after all so it’s a crap shoot) and take off the cover and let it expose for… well that’s the tricky part. These are pretty much long exposures, the paper isn’t exactly designed for quick shots like film, so 30-60ish seconds?!?! Once we take our shot we drop it into the developing baths and when done we go out and try again once we realise the exposure is completely pants.
So you might have noticed something a little unusual here. For those that don’t know optics is weird and pin holes tend to flip every image upside down, including the pin holes in your eyes!!! Whilst our brains are insanely great at mentally flipping this the right way round in real time (we think?!?!), you need to do a little more tinkering with a photo when it’s just directly exposed in this way… also because it’s a positive image being exposed to paper directly it turns into a negative one, that’s why most film stock is negative exposed to flip it back and you get the idea….
Not pictured was my first attempt which was so overexposed it just came out black (negative remember), the third was on some dodgy old paper so it just came out like garbage, and the second was some experimentation with practical ghosting.
I was feeling a little nostalgic when I looked at my pinhole yesterday and I realised I hadn’t properly digitised my images, already considering what experimentation I could do with the process at some point in the future.
S
