There is a camera maker in Hong Kong who makes great pinhole cameras. You can find him and his work at Zero Image. He makes cameras for 120, 35mm, and 4×5 inch sheet film. Here’s what they look like.
This camera, made for 120 size film, has an aperture of f/138. Yes, that’s one hundred and thirty eight. It’s very finely made.
I have a Canon PowerShot SD 870 point and shoot camera. The pictures it takes are very good. I like it…except for one thing. The instruction manual is 241 pages…for a point and shoot camera. It seems like the better things get the more complicated they get. Photography should be more like Kodak’s old saying, “You press the button, we do the rest.”
Pinhole Cameras are much easier to use. You can read the instructions for most pinhole cameras in seconds. Try one.
The best way to learn how to use your digital camera is to learn how pinhole cameras work! Pinhole cameras get you to the basics of photography. The aperture (f/stop) is fixed. That takes away one variable of fancier digital cameras. You have to actually calculate (sometimes it even takes a pencil and paper) the proper exposure time. That makes you aware of the relationship between f/stop and shutter speed. Since pinhole cameras do not have zoom lenses, you have to actually move the pinhole camera in closer…a good idea for all photographers.
Once you take a pinhole picture, the chances are that you are going to actually make a print. You don’t want to go to all the trouble in taking a pinhole picture and then not seeing how it turned out. You can scan the negative easily (if you are using black and white film).
By studying your picture you can usually figure out how you can do it better next time. When you use a digital camera you usually take so many pictures that you forget how you created them.
Pinhole photography slows you down and makes you think.
Your old 35 mm camera, the one you haven’t used for a while, can be converted into a pinhole camera. And, it won’t hurt the camera at all. When you take off the lens from an SLR (or DSLR), you can put a body cap on in its place. If you have a body cap fitted with a pinhole in it, you can create your own pinhole images. This photo was made with my 20-year-old Minolta camera. It’s a picture of the historic Alice Austen House in Staten Island, New York. My pinhole body cap is from Christiansen Gallery.
Here’s a simple picture…
…that was made with this equally simple pinhole camera.
Here’s a short overview that I created showing what a pinhole camera is and how it works.
The video is on YouTube so it may take a few extra seconds to load properly.