As mentioned before this years Easter Sunday was also World Pinhole Day. For the fun of it I decided to go back to the very roots of photography and give it a shot or two…
Tulips with shoe box camera
To get the low tech feeling I went through the apparment looking for a box to use and found an empty shoe box that seemed about right. I could fit in a 10x15cm sheet of paper and the focal length would be about 100mm. For the pinhole I used simply kitchen tin foil. Unfortunately that stuff is so thin that it is really next to impossible to get a round pinhole into it. My first attempts always looked like I used a pump gun to get the hole into it 😉 Finally I managed to get a pinhole that looked okay. As far as you can judge a 0.4mm hole with the naked eye… After everything was fitted I loaded the camera with a sheet of Ilford RC grade 2 paper, covered the pinhole and went outside for a shot. Even though I had taped the lid to the box to get it half way light sealed – the box itself (being a 1mm thick cardboard box) was far from being light sealed. Pretty much every corner must have been leaking into to box. Anyway the aperture was somewhere around 200 giving me an exposure time of 3mins (I rated the paper to be about ISO8). Continue reading