A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I picked up an inexpensive gadget for my Nikon: a pinhole lens. I had intended to use this for a wedding that I was shooting, but the couple decided they didn’t have time to pose in a local park. A great shame. I had pretty much forgotten about this lens, until an acquaintance of mine, English photographer Alfie Goodrich, announced a workshop based around pinhole photography.
What makes a pinhole lens special? Let’s see – it’s taking a trip back in time to the tenth century, recreating those early imaging techniques but with the added value of being able to see the recorded image right away. Stripping cameras back to their bare essentials – and dealing with the problems early photographers faced – long exposure times and images that suffered from poor quality lenses. Wearing the hair shirt, if you like. A little bit of adversity goes a long way.
So I’ve been shooting with my Kenko Pinhole Lens (details in Japanese here)http://www.2dachsies.com/2dachsies.com/Pinhole.html#9
You don’t need to be able to read Japanese to see that this little beauty has an aperture of F250!! – and a field of view approximately equivalent to a 50mm Lens. Here in the first shot I’m on a 2 second exposure, so holding the camera on the ground kind of makes sense:
Today I took a bike ride to Nakano-ku, and cruising along route 318, got the shot below. Exposure 1/6 second, handheld and riding at about 10km/hour. I’m having a lot of fun with pinhole!
PeterPix 