First Pictures

I've taken a few shots with the pinhole camera I have made. Its interesting to see the results but frustrating as a perfectionist. At least with digital the variables are identifiable and there is lots of information and inspiration for taking good shots for presentation.

But with a pinhole not only must timing be considered, its difficult to work out exactley what is in shot. There's also design flaws like size of the pinhole which are bound to effect the print, like the size of the whole... surely if the whole is bigger a wider beam of light will hit the paper will this effect focus, cause blur or an over exposed effect? If I had a smaller whole wouldn't that mean that I had a smaller, sharper image? But that would mean less light in a time period, does that mean I'd have to expose the media for longer?

There is so much to explore and frankly I don't think I have enough time to explore it all. Some of the prints I have now are ok, they can be identified and matched to the featured objects. Therefore I am not going to spend lots of time exploring the effect of the pin hole size, logically its self explanatory: The whole needs to be the size of a pin pierce.

The variable when taking shots with the pin hole seems to be the exposure time and the amount of light in the shot. For my presentation I will take several shots which have had different expose times... I'll present in a chronological order. And to make sure the presentation shows an fairly tested experiment I will take the shots at the same time of the day in the same place. Then I should be able to conclude with an idea how long exposure should be to create good prints. I also hope to be able to use the information to take some more good shots of other objects.

Pin Hole Cameras

The concept of a pin hole camera looks relatively simple.

I've done a little research (picture left is from wikipedia) and in addition to what Mr. Davies said the simplest designs are the best. Its just important that pin hole cameras don't allow any light in.

I will simply use a piece of black card to make two boxes bids of the same size. I'll then put a hole in once of the faces and mount paper to the inside of the opposite lid. So whats pictured is the same as what's shown in the picture above.

I predict that the difficultly will be in mastering the exposure time. I also suspect that we will have to expose the paper for a fair amount of time.. 10 secs or so... I assume to stop blurring the objects in shot must be still.