pinhole - composition advice

[jano]

Never got around to my surfing pinhole attempts, I've been very ill.

Anway, I was inspired by the lousy weather, tried rose+guitar+beach, and then my matchbox pinhole stopped working 🙁 Nothing seems to work right these days. Out of the five shots, and in between coughing fits of pneumonia, one actually exposed well. But - not sure I like the composition. Any thoughts on making the scene a little more dramatic if I try to redo this?

I wanted to do a self portrait here, but no one was around to help flap the "shutter" for me, and running back and forth was too hard.

thanks.

 

[pvdhaar]

Beyond the image softness, the most telltale aspect of a pinhole is the way perspective is rendered away from the center. You could try to emphasise this by placing the camera lower.

But you may tak emy advice with a grain of salt, my own attempts so far haven't been exactly stellar. I've worked with a body cap on an F90x, so the focal length is 'normal', ca. 46mm. I'm planning to make a body cap pinhole for the RF, ca. 28mm so that it's more wide angle and I can take better advantage of how perspective is rendered.

 

[rtphotos]

Hi Jano,

I do like the image, generally speaking. But if you hadn't mentioned the "rose", I might have missed it.

You might take advantage of the incredible depth of field of pinhole cameras and place the guitar and rose closer to the camera. MUCH closer - perhaps even placing the guitar flat, and place the camera right ON TOP the guitar. I can imagine compositions where the long neck of the instrument might lead to the placement of the rose.

As for self portraits, how long are your exposures? On my pinhole, I had exposures that were about 2 minutes in overcast sunlight and 100 ISO. That would give me time to open the shutter and run into the frame. It often would give me ghost-like, transparent images of myself. Maybe not what you are after, but might be fun to try.

Keep at it. Have fun!
rt

 

[stuken]

Beyond the image softness, the most telltale aspect of a pinhole is the way perspective is rendered away from the center. You could try to emphasise this by placing the camera lower.

Would you mind explaining this further, I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean?

Cheers

 

[pvdhaar]

Would you mind explaining this further, I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean?

Cheers

Absence of a lens means that the light that passes through the pinhole continues to travel along an exactly straight path. As a result, straight lines in the real world will come out as perfect straight lines on the film. A side effect of this is, that as the film plane is flat, the distance from the pinhole to the various locations on the film differs from image centre to image edge. Your pinhole photo will have the esoteric effect that identical objects placed in a circle around the camera will show up larger if they're furher away from the image centre.

In glass lenses, the lens designers can counter this effect to a certain degree. Wide angle lenses where this effect isn't countered are very useful for architectural photography, but poor at shooting people; you get egg shaped heads near the borders of the image. Some lens manufacturers deliberately give their wide angles (or zooms at wide angle for that matter) a barrel shaped distortion. This makes them less attractive for shooting architecture, but perfect for journalism where you shoot in crowds..

 

[rbiemer]

Jano,
Hope you feel better soon. And take another look at your results when you do!
Compositionally, I would only suggest that you get closer.
And which leads me to this:
To save yourself "running" for the selfportraits, consider what rt says above and put the camera much closer to yourself--within arm's length so you can simply reach out and open the shutter.

Rob

 

[jano]

Thank you, I was thinking closer would be better as well. I can crop, but then you lose the vignetting and the softness of the image becomes too distracting. Personally distracted by how it just kind of sticks up (phallic?).. I will try laying it down. Although, it's very hard to put a multi $k instrument in the sand :| Maybe I should go get a beater or put a towel under it.

 

[JoeV]

That is a nice photo, Jano. I would recommend placing the camera closer, but unless your camera is of a ultra-wide angle of view (>100 degrees), if you get it too close the guitar will obscure the important setting of the beach scene. So get in closer, yes; but not too close.

Something else I would recommend for this composition is to try angling the face of the guitar such that it is illuminated by the sun, rather than being on the shadow side. Angle it to catch just a bit of light off its face, to fill in what appears to be mainly a silhouette.

Also, if you're using small formats for pinhole, like matchbox sized, keep in mind that highly detailed (sharp looking) pinhole images favor larger formats. Comparing two hypothetical pinhole cameras of the same angle of view, the larger format will have the longer projection length, which can be optimized with a higher F-number aperture (by the Rayleigh formula), resulting in sharper images. But at the expense of requiring longer exposure times, however.

So compositions created with these small format pinhole cameras should purposely not rely on sharpness in order for the viewer to appreciate your creative intention. In this example, the roses are simply too indistinct at the distance you've set them back from the camera to appreciate. For these small gauge cameras, think soft, grainy, simple compositions of shapes and tones and forms; not highly detailed landscape images, for instance.

BTW, I didn't intend for my response to sound anything like a critique, but having dabbled in mainly pinhole (and to a lesser extent RF cameras) for the last 15 years I saw your post as an opportunity to share my experience. If you are in any way interested in more pinhole dabblers, feel free to drop by to F295 for a visit and a chat, and post some more images.

~Joe

 

[jano]

Joe, that's totally awesome, thanks for your time.

If another day like that happens to occur (we've had clear skies since monday), I may give this another shot later. It was a lot of fun, but the dang matchbox pinholes take too long to actually make. Results are a lot of fun.

Due to weather changes I ended up just working with the image by cropping it and sticking a stupid slogan on it. Here's the ultimate fate, poor, poor photo! 😛 Printed it on very nice card stock, placed it inside a high-quality-paper envelope sealed with wax, then shipped out to kissimme, FL, for creative postmarking, thereafter to be sent and delievered to the intended recipient by next week. :angel:

 

[mjflory]

Jano, get well soon!

When you're feeling up for it, you might want to try a pinhole format bigger than a matchbox for greater detail. This weekend I experimented a little with my homemade pinhole camera based on an old Polaroid pack-film back. This shot is on Fuji's FP-100C color pack film (ASA 100). The print is 3-1/4 x 4-1/4 inches (about 8 x 10 cm).

By the way, I hope everyone is getting ready for Worldwide Pinhole Day on April 27. As I write it's only 81 days, 7 hours, and 9 minutes away.

 

[jano]

Larger format has its place, and I hope to try it soon 🙂

Sometimes, though, you don't need or want the detail - impressionism at its finest, right?

 

[MartinP]

When I was still in the UK (ie. long ago) I tried a pinhole camera made mainly from a shoe box. I had a hole in one end and could put the paper-negative in at various distances from the pinhole. I thought I was being very smart, even curving the paper, but I never really sorted out the exposure. Thanks to this thread I think I might try it again.

🙂

 

[jano]

Martin, it's lotsa fun - I use the mrpinhole.com resources combined with the ultimate exposure computer to get a ballpark idea for exposure, but then I forget all about it. When playing with pinholes, I just kinda experiment, main goal is to enjoy playing with a tool I made 🙂 Who cares about sharpness, DOF, bokeh, exposure, etc etc, so long as you get some results, something to do with box of chocolates here 😛

 

[Windscale]

Jano,

How are you getting on with your pinhole photography? I think in order to get the kind of dramatic effect you liked you ought to have a very wide angled set up. I use a 6x6 format with 0.17mm pinhole and 18mm focal length. But your subject has to be very close as well. My setup enables to focus from 9 inches away. As to exposure, you will have to experiment. 5 seconds or so for ASA160 at EV14 should work.
Good luck.

 

[P.Negro]

When I shoot pinhole I just generally use the camera like eyesight if that makes sense. I don't try to compose as much as view things.