Pinhole (G)Fun

Reading online forums could give the impression that all there is to photography is gear, sharp images, no noise and high dynamic range.


Well, I could not disagree more. In my opinion photography or anything else which is creative should be about fun, enjoyment and the drive to experiment. So in the spirit of experimenting I always wanted to try some pinhole photography. Since building my first camera obscre in school, which feels like ages ago now, I always found the simplicity of this fascinating and it was one of the main reasons for me to buy a interchangeable lens camera. Since I am not into film and would never consider using (or lugging around more precisely) a dSLR the GF1 was the ideal camera to try this.

So as it often is with having too much time on your hands, I set poff and created a first version of a pinhole lens, it was a simple as taking some tinfoil and wrapping it around the c-mount adapter I bought. Making the right sized hole in there took a few attempts but I managed to get it working well enough as you can see here.

Because it looks silly to have tinfoil stuck in front of your camera had to find something better and I figured taking some black cardboard and poking a hole in there should do the job. Unfortunatelly this did not work quite as well and my hole was too big so this version failed, see here for the result.

Taking what I learned from the first experiments I decided to combine them into one lens which allows for the outside to look nice and black while the inside uses tinfoil for the 'aperture' or pinhole so it allows for smaller and more customizable pinhole size. This worked great and it allows me to 'change' the aperture and even do some '3D pinhole photography' by just having a 2nd hole next to the first. This I rounded off with using some glue and a magazine cutout with the picture of the Sigma DP1 lens which was a perfect fit for the size.

Overall this was a fantastic experiment and it helped me learn 2 things.

First, you can photoshop as much as you like but you can't use a pinhole efect n Photoshop or in camera in place of a real pinhole lens. It simply is not the same thing.

This leads me to reason number two. Using a pinhole lens means you need to expose every picture much longer so composition becomes way more important as well as the angle you take the picture, also the pictures won't be very sharp and suffer from low dynamic range. All these things make pinhole pictures very different and also help to slow you down and start thinking more about the picture you are about to take.

I can fully recommend this to anyone as it is fun and it does not cost you anything to try it out.