Experimental Photography

In 1979, I was attending college, majoring in photography. During my first photography course, we all got to learn about cameras and how they worked from the inside out by having to build our own pinhole cameras. Mine was the size of an ordinary box camera and we used cut 8x10 sheets of black and white photo paper as negatives. You could get four "negatives" from one sheet of paper. This is what is/was known as Calotype photography, first used in 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot. The college had a darkroom the students could work in, so to be able to use your camera, you had to load one "negative" into your homemade camera, (in the dark, of course), and then about the only thing readily available as a subject was the college and it's surrounding area - it was located out in the middle of nowhere. I chose some cars in the parking lot, looking off in the direction of the nearest small town. When the picture was taken and developed, you had to contact print it to get your image. This image is actually one of the "negatives" I made 30 years ago, only just rediscovered. I have reversed it so that it becomes a negative image of what was originally a negative image. Now it's a positive image and looks essentially fairly normal. It also has the advantage of being one stage clearer, from not having to contact print it to produce the final, positive image. Depending on the size of the hole you made for your aperture, you could get more or less detail. I remember experimenting and this image is an earlier shot when the aperture hole was smaller. Later pictures seemed to have lost a little definition, but gained a cool "vignette" effect on the overall image. Being an imprecise science, there is some distortion in this image along the right edge.

i made a pinhole camera out of this old Pringles can. I actually got it to produce an image.

This was the image from my PringCam 1.0 - I would deem it not a failure because it did turn out an image. The subject was tiny diecast tractors made by Ertl, less than an inch long. The problem was, when I started the nearly four-hour long exposure, the wind was not blowing at all. But, by the time the exposure ended, it had picked up to a brisk breeze and the tiny weeds in the background, (which look like trees) were blurred from motion. At least I know my PringCam works. Now, to work out a few minor bugs and try it out again under the new name of PringCam 1.1. Camera: PringCam 1.0 pinhole camera Film: Kentmere 100 ASA 35mm black and white film Pinhole size: .15mm Aperture: F/1747 Exposure length: 3 hours, 48 minutes Date: June 27th, 2012 Location: Norris City, Illinois, U.S.A. Developing chemicals at 68 degrees: Ilford ID-11 developer: 9 minutes Ilford Ilfostop stopbath: 1 minute Ilford Hypam fixer: 6 minutes Water rinse: 1 minutes PringCam 03c

Here is what the setup for the digital pinhole macro photography shot looked like. You can see the Pringles can attached to the front of my Sony Alpha A230 digital slr body and the Matchbox car about three inches from the front of the lens. Camera used to take this image: $5 Shift 3 Mini Digital Camera (Vivitar Mini Digital clone) Resolution: .1 megapixels Lens focal length: f=3.9mm Exposure setting: Automatic Aperture: f/2.8 Shutter speeds: 1/60 to 1/1500 sec. Date: June 28th, 2012, 11.56 a.m. Location: Norris City, Illinois, U.S.A. 02-004b

This was my second attempt at capturing a picture with my PringCam 1.0 attached to my Sony Alpha A230 digital slr body. For this shot, I used approximately a 12 minute exposure and 400 ISO. There was a whole lot less grain. It won't win any photography awards, but I have proven that it's possible to slap a potato chip can over a digital camera body and still get an image.

This is an approximately 1:64 scale Matchbox racecar, and I used it as my subject for a digital pinhole project I was attempting. I had made a pinhole camera out of an empty can of Pringles and then I used it as a closeup lens on the body of my Sony Alpha A230 DSLR. If you look at the logo just between the door and the front wheelwell, "Diehard," you'll see the area my digital pinhole setup focused on.

Here is my little pinhole camera I made out of an empty Kodak Tri-X 35mm film box once I had cut a length of unexposed Tri-X film to use in it as a single negative. (In total darkness, of course!) I had cut a special holder out of cardboard from a box of raisins, which was the same thickness as the film box, to hold the negative in place at the back of the camera. I had cut a frame in it so that the area which is normally exposed on 35mm film was approximated. It turned out to be a little wider than a normal 35mm frame, but I figured that wouldn't matter. The piece of duct tape down the top/middle was my "shutter." I doubled the end over at the top so I could pull it lose to start my exposures.

This was my fourth attempt at getting a usuable image with my little homemade Kodak Trix-X film box pinhole camera. Finally, it worked! The frame was the average height of a regular 35mm negative, but the width turned out to be like a panoramic camera. I wasn't sure of the focal length, but the equivelant image I took with a digital camera translated to be 18mm. So, that would lead me to believe this film box camera was 18mm also. I'm still not certain what is causing the little arc of exposed dots along the bottom of the frame. This glitch also turned up in the last shot I took with this camera, but that one had a different pinhole piece than this one, so it wasn't an imperfection in my pinhole. (Or maybe I recreated the exact same imperfection?) If anybody recognizes this aberration or what causes it, please let me know. I'd really like to be able to correct this and get one really good shot. Camera: Film Box Pinhole Camera Lens: Pinhole (approx .051mm) Film: Kodak Tri-X 400 ISO black and white 35mm film Exposure length: 2.2 secs. Date: September 25th, 2010, 15:07:26 p.m. Location: Fairfield, Illinois, U.S.A. Developing specifics (chemicals at 68 degrees): D-76: 7 mins. Ilford Ilfostop stop bath: 1 min. Kodak fixer: 8 mins. Rinse: 5 mins. Kodak Photo-Flo 200: 1 min.

This is my Minolta XD11 SLR converted to be a pinhole camera. I took the pinhole from another camera and placed it on this Minolta and ran a roll of Kodak Tri-X through it, bracketing exposures lenghts to see what would work best for the size of pinhole this was. After developing it and scanning the negatives, I realized that the pinhole was fairly big and didn't render much detail. There were a couple light leaks on the left and right lower corners, but other than that, the theory held up - it could produce pinhole images.

My house, from across the street. Taken as an experiment using a Minolta XD11 converted to be a pinhole camera. This image has not been subjected to any post processing sharpening. But, you could tell that because it's so crappy. It also hasn't been cropped. Camera: Minolta XD11 Lens: Pinhole taped over lens thread Film: Kodak Tri-X 400 ISO black and white 35mm film Exposure length: 5 secs. Date: September 15th, 2010, 5.33 p.m. Location: Norris City, Illinois, U.S.A. Developing specifics (chemicals at 68 degrees): D-76: 6 3/4 mins. (1:1) Ilford Ilfostop stop bath: 1 min. Kodak fixer: 8 mins. Rinse: 5 mins. Kodak Photo-Flo 200: 1 min.

An experimental pinhole attachment I made out of a body cap to one of my digital camera bodies. Doing more research on the internet, I came across a site selling these already made. They claimed that a pinhole/body cap conversion for a Minolta Maxxum such as this was the equivalent of a 45mm focal length. I guess that's why both images I took looked fairly normal. It also fits Konica Minolta digital cameras such as the KM Maxxum 5D and Sony DSLRs.

Sunrise at 6:29:54 this morning. I was using my Sony A230 DSLR with a pinhole conversion built into a Konica Minolta Maxxum 5D DSLR body cap. Camera: Sony Alpha A230 Lens: Konica Minolta Maxxum 5D DSLR body cap with pinhole conversion ISO: 800 Shutter speed: 1/2 sec. Exposure program: Manual Date: September 14th, 2010, 6:29:54 a.m. Location: Norris City, Illinois, U.S.A.

I've been making pinholes lately with good sharp pins. This one was taken with a Konica Minolta DSLR body cap on a Sony Alpha A230 DSLR body. Evidently, when you use a good, fine-pointed needle, you can get a much more accurate and smaller opening for your pinhole. I redid the pinhole in the body cap and it came out like this - it makes all the difference.

Back in 1979 when I had just started college, my second experimental homemade camera used 126 cartridge film. Unlike my first pinhole camera that used 4x5 inch sized film paper negatives and turned out pretty good, this camera was not a success. The pictures from this one, (this is a sunset in my backyard), had no clarity at all and although you can't tell it in this particular shot, had serious vignetting problems along the right third of the frame. Camera: Instamatic 126 converted into a pinhole camera Film: Kodak Safety Film, 100 ASA 126 size Aperture: ? Exposure length: 3 seconds Date: September 1979 Location: Norris City, Illinois, U.S.A.

This is an image I took for a photography class when I was attending college. All I can remember about it is that I used a 126 Kodak 100 ASA film cartridge and that the pinhole didn't turn out to be real round. I was thinking that I converted a Kodak Instamatic X-15 into a pinhole camera, but could never find the actual camera. I either got rid of it for some unknown reason or converted one of the three I have back to normal.

Another example of a 620 pinhole camera I was testing back in 1977. For some reason, all the negatives exhibit bad light leak problems. The fact that it resembles a shot taken with a fisheye lens is misleading. What is actually taking place here is I was shooting out my bedroom window through an arch opening out to the front yard and road beyond. The top half of the circle is the edge of the arch. The bottom half of the circle is the shadow created from the arch in addition to which it was a dark, cloudy day and what was in shadow just didn't get much exposure or light. Another thing I noticed was that, the only 620 cameras I had at the time were Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash cameras, which run the negative from above to below, making the images sideways compared to the number strips along each edge. This entire set of negatives featured the images right side up, with the number strips running above and below the image, as if the film travelled left to right. For the life of me, I can't image what I did or what camera I used to get the images to turn out that way.

I found this envelope of 620 negatives and, for the life of me, cannot remember anything about the camera I used to take them. I'm thinking it must have been a homemade one because if I had just converted one of my old Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash cameras to a pinhole camera, the images would have been situated on the negatives differently. A Brownie Hawkeye's film transport is vertical, that is, the film is at the top and spools downwardly to the bottom. These negatives are all left to right spooled, so that seems to rule out a Brownie Hawkeye camera conversion. None of my other 620 cameras spool left to right so I'm left in the dark as what I used to take the pictures. Another clue that it might have been a homemade jobby was that the negatives show a serious light leak at both the top and the bottom of the strips. Also, from looking at the images, it looks like I got the hole too big. The images are all a little blurry and not very focused. Back in 1977 when I shot these, (1977 is most likely indicated), I probably considered the test to have been a failure. Now, they're just semi-interesting curiosities. Camera: Unknown Film: Kodak Safety Film 6014, 100 ASA 620 color film Date: 1977 (?) Location: Norris City, Illinois, U.S.A. This picture is the way it looked straight out of the camera. What could I do to it anyway to improve it? It's beyond all help.