
The image above was shot with a Zero Image 6×9 pinhole camera on Ilford Delta 100-120 film by fellow member of The Toronto Film Shooters Fraser Shein.
Now shooting with a pinhole camera isn’t as easy as shooting with a modern digital mirrorless camera but it shows what can be done by a photographic artist using minimal equipment.
And that’s the point of this post. You don’t need a $5,000 camera and a bag of lenses to create a really good image like this one by Fraser. But as Fraser told me he’s still struggling to get one or two images out of each roll of film due mainly to mechanical issues.
There are quite a few pinhole cameras being sold and the Zero Image cameras run around $200 US.
So what is a pinhole camera? Well it’s a light-tight box and that’s about it. There is no lens (and thus no aperture) but instead there’s a tiny opening (the pin hole) that lets in light when manually opened. The light is allowed to enter for many minutes (as determined by experimenting with your camera) and then the pin hole is closed again.
At the other end of the box there’s a roll of film or a single sheet that gets exposed and then developed normally.
One of the features of a pinhole camera is the image which while not sharp has almost total depth of field. There can be a lot of motion blur and this only adds to the dreamy effect.
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