A very good friend of mine works almost exclusively in Pinholes. He has made
many
many cameras. One of his favourites is a converted attache case. There is a
pinhole
in the centre of the upper lid of the case. The images he makes are very large.
This camera is great for candid work since no one has a clue that a picture
is being
made. He uses ordinary enlarging paper instead of film and contact prints
the paper
negatives. I was surprised at the quality of the images.
Some of the other cameras he produced included a pinhole plate attached to
a 35mm
Kodak Bantam camera, and a box camera with a 4x5 roll film adapter for
medium format
images.
Since an exposure takes 20 to 30 minutes (for paper negs) you may want
to make 2 or 3 cameras and set them all up at different points of interest.
He ran a workshop and everyone made their own camera in a morning. We used black
gator board and black masking tape. The pinholes were produced from
aluminum from
a pie plate. Most people chose to make cameras that fit standard 4x5 film
holders so that we could
make multiple exposures without running back into the darkroom.
For versatility you may want to make a box where you can adjust the distance
of the pinhole
to the film and also experiment with the size of the pinholes. I urge you
to start off with the black
gator board, its real easy to work with and you can easily change the
dimensions of the camera.
After your fifth or sixth camera you may "find" your camera, at that point
you may wish
to replicate it in wood.
By the way, I think that the Maine Photographic Workshops sell a wooden
pinhole camera (US$ around $100 nice finish) and offer a Pinhole workshop.
They had
a number of beautiful pinhole images on display in NewYork at the Viscomm94
tradeshow taken with the camera. A similar (or the same) wooden pinhole
camera is adveriszed in the
Pinhole journal publication, the address of which was posted to this list
earlier in the week.
Let us know your progress.
Robert Hudyma Email: rhudyma@idirect.com