Pinhole Camera Day 2012

Ranger Duck - view through a pinhole

Worldwide Pinhole Camera Day was Sunday, April 29th. Pinhole photography encourages us to look at our pictures through a different set of "lenses".  As a landscape photographer, I'm usually looking for naturally lit scenes with bright colors and infinite sharp focus from foreground to background.  But maybe my photos don't always need to be 100% sharp, centered, in-focus, and color-correct to capture the spirit of the scene or the moment.

Poppies, Morro Bay, 

30mm Lensbaby, f5.6, 1/250, ISO 200

Seaside Daisy, Piedras Blancas, 

300mm Pentax, f6.3, 1/800, ISO 200

Here's a pinhole experiment you can try at home.  Both photos were taken with a Pentax K5 digital camera using a tripod and natural light at ISO 200.  The first photo used a Pentax 50mm f1.4 lens set at f22 for 8 seconds.  The second photo was from a pinhole - f176 at 5 minutes using a Lensbaby 50mm pinhole optic.

Setting up the pinhole photo is challenging since you can't view the image through the viewfinder  But digital cameras provide easy and nearly instant options to see picture (this may be considered cheating to some film-based pinhole enthusiasts).  I set up the composition with a normal 50mm lens, f2 and ISO 800, and took a photo to get a sense of the arrangement and exposure, and verified exposure with a Sekonic L758 light meter.  Then I picked f22 for maximum depth of field and took the first image.  Next, I put on the 50mm pinhole lens, changed to ISO 6400 and took a 15 second exposure to see how it looked.  Finally, I hooked up an ISR Twin intervelometer and took a 5 minute photo at ISO 200 for the pinhole image.