Interviews and discussions

Publish date:

04/05/08 @937

Pinhole photography

Joost (Millink) Mellink is very much into Pinhole photography, and would like to share his passion with fellow artists interested in this method of taking photos.

In short, a pinhole camera is a camera without a lens. A regular camera (with lens) spreads the light equally on the film, this way you get a nice sharp image within 1/30th of a second. A pinhole camera does this in slow motion…

Instead of using a lens, the pinhole camera use a very tiny hole to bundle the light, and spread it on your film. This way, all the false light gets excluded, and your film won’t get overexposed. Because the hole is so incredibly small (1 millimetre at max), not a lot of light ‘burns’ the film: about 20 times less than a normal camera. This requires a much longer shutter speed. A converted pinhole DSLR has a shutter speed of 30 seconds, instead of 1/60th of a second.

There is an advantage to this tiny hole:

Diaphragm is the keyword in pinhole photography. Where your standard DSLR has a diaphragm of 4-36, a large pinhole camera has a whooping 480! Diaphragm is nothing more then the relation between focus length and the diameter of a lens. And the ‘lens’ of a pinhole camera is amazingly small! No wonder the diaphragm is so high. Don’t underestimate this: with a diaphragm of 200, the photo is completely in focus! With pinhole photography, focusing is never an issue; the image is always focused. An important downside however, is that pinhole photo’s can never be as sharp as regular photo’s. Precise pinholes are hard or expensive to make, even in a perfect world; a lens just bundles the light a lot better. However, with a laser burned hole, and a good tripod, incredibly sharp photos have been made.

Most pinhole photographers use plain photo paper. This a lot cheaper then negatives, easy to develop and generally easy to handle. On the contrary, RC photo paper have an ISO of around 8 or 9. So your shutter speed increases even more. But every developable surface can be used to take photos with. So using negatives is always an option. With the coming of Digital single-lens reflex cameras, a lot of people are even experimenting with digital pinhole cameras. Or Digital Pinhole Single Lens Reflex cameras in short. Awesome word for hangman…

As for myself: I've built five cameras. Most of them are made out of tea boxes or simple cans. My biggest (focus length: 350 mm) is made out of wood and has a diaphragm of 480, and is by far the sharpest. Since it weighs around 7 kilogram, it’s not very easy to walk around with. This can be a downside for a lot of people. A solution is to build smaller cameras thus making them lighter. Using negatives or making your pinhole slightly bigger (but your losing sharpness), I for myself prefer heavier camera’s: it forces me to THINK about my photos. I even go as far as sketching photos and taking test-photos with a digital camera. Then I’m setting everything up, checking everything again, and THEN I take my photo and wait 60 minutes or so. It just takes too much time and effort to take 5 photos of one subject. But, this way every photo is special and unique.

Pinhole photography is a peculiar way of looking at photography. On one hand its clumsy, takes a lot of time and the result can be de-motivating. On the other hand it forces you to think about photography, what you want to say or show with your photo’s and forces you to be creative. I love taking simple shots, and to have a quick result with my digital camera. But working hard, and building up expectations can be very, very satisfying on a different level. In my opinion, photography is all about controlling as many things as possible. I try to control the light, camera settings and the final product by post-editing it. Pinhole photography does just that, in the most extreme way, and with the most exciting results!

Joost Mellink (Millink)

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SandraS

04/08/08 @591

Thanks for sharing this interesting story with us, Joost. It was a good reading. Now, what leaves me even more curious about pinhole photography now, than before I read this article, is: ...But how do you put film inside that box? Do you glue it on the inside of the box, and how big is it? And, how long do need to let it stand before you'll get a photo?
Maybe you allready answered this in your article, but I'm a sucker when it comes to photography words such as ISO, DSLR and shutterspeed.

jimkennedy

04/11/08 @778

Nice work Joost - minor quibble: the diagram at the top is a little off - the image of the tree inside a pinhole camera should be upside down.

I like the picture you've made. Cool stuff...

Jim.

NP1313

05/29/08 @814

My first year in photography class we had to bring a container, shoebox, bread crumb container anything and we had to paint the inside black so no light would get through and mess up the light sensitive paper...it was really fun and we learned how pretty much how a camera worked. Really incredible article on pinhole cameras.

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