Pinholes

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Thanks to lil’s excellent photoblog, esthet, I found out in time to sign up for a pinhole photography workshop here in Tokyo.
Last night was a talk by Edward Levinson, our instructor, and then we made our cameras. Today we took pictures and developed them.
Pinhole cameras are lensless, so they have no focus–or rather they have infinite focus. And becasue the apeture is small, they have great depth of field. Everything is in focus from close up to far away. Unless it moves…
We made our cameras from boxes and cans, painted black on the inside and taped to keep light out. We punched pinholes through aluminum, then attached the pinholes to the boxes with tape. Another bit of tape covered the hole.
That’s all there is to it. You stick in some film or photographic paper, peel off the tape, count the seconds (or minutes) until you’ve properly exposed and then you put the tape back on. That’s what we did all day today, interspersed with running up to the darkroom to develop out images.
It was my first time in a darkroom, believe it or not ,and I loved it. It’s like magic to see the images develop. Photoshop is great but I learned to dodge for real!
Sometimes the negatives turned out better than the positives. I like the negative of this image, taken with Ed’s three-hole camera. The lines from the shutter I sat in front ove overlap nicely. But the positive reveals entirely too much facial detail.
One photo I took (and one of Tod’s, too) will be in the online event gallery which includes photos from all over the world. You can see the photos from our workshop in person in at Tokyo Photographic Culture Centre (Akasaka 3-9-1) from May 10 – early June.
(click the images here for larger versions)