A Continued Journey into the Pinhole, David Jordan

A CONTINUED JOURNEY INTO THE PINHOLE WORLD

DAVID JORDAN FRPS

In March 2017, I entered the dark and mysterious world of digital pinhole photography, by purchasing a pinhole body cap for my Canon EOS M3 camera. This modest and rather simple purchase has transformed my photography in many ways, but primarily it made me concentrate upon composition, lighting and texture, the basic tools of photography. With a pinhole camera there is no control of the focusing or aperture setting (in my camera’s case it is approximately f180), so by setting the camera to Aperture Priority and Auto ISO you then end up with an interesting ‘point and shoot’ camera.

I wrote a brief article for the Creative Eye in May 2017 about digital pinhole photography a couple of months after I had obtained the pinhole body cap, so it now seems a good time to look at what happened next.

There were some significant technical issues to address when using the pinhole body cap on the Canon camera, the main ones being a lack of absolute sharpness in the image and a considerable amount of vignetting in the corners. The lack of sharpness actually gave the images a ‘pleasing lack of definition’ and ambiguity, the vignetting could be managed with careful post processing. The other issues to deal with were image noise due to the high ISO settings needed for hand holding the camera, but with careful post processing the image the noise worked well with the lack of definition, to create an interesting ‘texture’ in the images. Cloning skills had to be frequently practised, as any small spot of dust on the sensor was reproduced with great fidelity at f180! One of the more interesting flaws of the pinhole body cap is its dramatic lens flare patterns, when the sun is directly in or near to the edge of the frame, but if it is used carefully it can add an interesting graphic texture to the image.

Subjects that seemed to work well in my case were church interiors, modern architecture, landscapes and detail shots. Overlaying a monochrome image on top of the colour image and using the Luminosity blending mode created some wonderfully grainy and richly coloured images. The images usually print well on a quality matt art paper, so long as they were between A5 and A4 size.

Some of the American car colour images that I created work well on a metallic paper, especially with the wonderful Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Metallic paper.

Eventually I went down the road of full frame photography, first with a Canon 6D mark 2 and then a Canon EOS R, needless to say a pinhole body cap followed me! The images created by the larger format were quite different to the ones created by the APS ‘C’ camera, they seem to have gentler contrast range and suffer from less vignetting and therefore need a different post processing technique. I then obtained a 28mm wide angle pinhole body cap (pinhole body caps normally have the same field of view as a 50mm lens) and my old friend heavy vignetting came back, but this time I knew what to do with him!

So, what about the images that a pinhole can create, well they can be seen as rather ‘arty’ and esoteric images. This means that if entered into camera club competitions they run the risk of being ‘judge bait’ but occasionally they can be appreciated by sympathetic souls. My greatest success with a pinhole image so far was having an image selected as a Finalist in the ‘Abstract Views’ category in the 2018 International Garden Photographer of the Year Competition. Some people may think why do I want to use a ‘lens’ that gives me inferior results, my answer is sometimes ‘perfection’ can be boring and there is often beauty in imperfection.

What of the future? I have recently had an old Canon EOS M3 converted with a 720nm infrared filter, so infra-red pinhole images are the next challenge.