Rummaging around in a drawer looking for something or other, I turned up something quite different that I'd forgotten I even had: a little round tin, about 2.5" in diameter, labelled "Pinwide: Micro Four Thirds Model. Designed in Chicago. Manufactured in the USA." Inside, there is what is essentially a Micro 4/3 body cap with a pinhole installed, giving a fixed aperture somewhere between f/96 and f/128, and a focal length of around 22mm in 35-mm terms. It's very cute, and – having succumbed to some well-pitched advertising – I had bought one on impulse, put it away, and promptly forgot all about it. Thinking about it, I last used a micro 4/3 camera, a Panasonic G3, when I was on a 10-day residency in Innsbruck in 2014. Almost immediately thereafter I switched to Fuji, and haven't looked back. Until today.
Pinhole photography was once a bit of a thing for me, when I was still using film. I removed the lens assemblies from several old box-style rollfilm cameras, and replaced them with pinholes I had made myself. I liked the idea of this most primitive of techniques, and admired the work of pinhole enthusiasts like Ruth Thorne-Thomsen and Abelardo Morell, but somehow the results never lived up to expectation. The need to use a tripod, for one thing, killed a lot of the spontaneity that is essential to my enjoyment of photography.
As far as I can recall, I've never actually tried using a pinhole on a digital camera before, so I dug out my Panasonic GF-1, charged up the battery, and headed out to experiment. Hand-held only, obviously. [Top Tip: for this sort of non-electronic attachment to work, you need to set "SHOOT W/O LENS" to "ON"]. It was fun, just pointing the combination at things, and letting the auto function work out the exposure. The results were better than I expected, especially for hand-held shots at f/96: almost the right combination of mystery and photographic crappiness. So much so, I might even consider the next logical step. Yes, a tripod. And, yes, I do own one (another impulse buy that sits in the back of a cupboard somewhere). And, yes, I suppose this is another gear post...
4 comments:
Hmmm. Kinda sorta interesting. What kind of exposure times are you using?
A tripod!? Egad! That will get documented, I hope.
Kent,
Yes, kinda sorta, but could be better, and I may give it a go. Amazingly, looking at the file data, the outdoor shutter speeds are all around 1/30 (at 800 ISO). On a tripod, obviously, things would be sharper, and setting a lower ISO would (probably) improve the noise. Where pinhole starts to get crazy, though, is pursuing optical perfection, instead of enjoying the optical mess...
The GF-1 is quite dated now, so probably doesn't handle longer exposures and faster ISOs too well. I may yet shop around for (or make) a pinhole for the Fuji... However, I suspect this is one area where the continuous tone of film is always going to be superior.
Mike
This might be the thing. I've experimented some with OoF exposures, and never really found one that worked to satisfaction. The blur can be delightful in the moment, but upon further examination it always seems to be a badly focused picture. No doubt it's in the mind of the beholder. Obviously.
Kent,
It's certainly true that its harder to get right than you might think. I'm not sure why it is that it works when it does, which is what I find interesting. Most pinhole pictures are what you say: just badly focused, poorly exposed pictures. But people who get it right manage to do something special.
Mike
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