I took the film from my pinhole camera to the lab yesterday and picked it up today. The resulting images were… well… better than nothing, but not great. They’re about what I expected, maybe a bit less. I rewound the film early by mistake, not wanting to tear it again, so that wasted the last 10 inches or so, but I still got enough images to be satisfied with it. I’m now more than ready to move back to my SLR.
I’m a little disappointed that the images didn’t fill the frame. They are also quite blurry. I think this is because of how crude the pinhole was. I made it by sticking a pin through a square of aluminium cut from a pop can. The grain is also quite awful in the images. I think this is partly the mechanics of the pinhole, but also the fact that I was using a roll of Agfa 200 that was well past expired.
Taking pictures with it was a pain. There’s obviously no viewfinder, so you just have to kind of guess, with no idea what your field of view is. Framing is completely based on luck. Being a matchbox, the pinhole was about 8mm from the film. I think this means an 8mm focal length, but I really don’t know.
The pinhole was incredibly small. I exposed the frames for about 5 seconds. There’s no way I could hold it still for that long, so I had to look for things like trashcans and mailboxes to hold the camera still against.
I started at the University:
This is the difference between a 5 and 10 second exposure:
This is a Presbyterian church near my house:
This is Offshore, a café down the road:
Here’s a couple of the Duke of Wellington statue in front of the Museum of Modern Art—somewhere in between the café and here my camera developed a light leak:
I took a few photos of these things with my Minolta on the XP2 I have in it as well, so I should have some quality black and white versions of these photos soon.
I still like the idea of pinhole cameras, but obviously the matchbox doesn’t work very well. Sometime in the future, maybe this Summer, I plan to build a 4x5 pinhole camera out of wood. I think a longer focal length will be helpful. At that size, it is also possible to buy proper metal apertures, which work a lot better than a pin and a can of IRN BRU. It is also the only way I’ll be able to afford to do large format any time soon.