New Adventures in Lo-Fi – Starting out in Pinhole Photography
I was given a Zero Image 6 x12 multi format pin hole camera for my birthday. It was something that I wanted very much, having traversed a grand arc of starting out at evening classes using Kodak Tri-X and buying a Pentax film SLR, to giving up on film, when the Site Gallery in Sheffield closed its public dark rooms and going digital. Since then I’ve gone from a Canon 20D to a 40D (with an IXUS 50 and G10 thrown in for good measure). Along the way I bought a Hasselblad XPAN, that I didn’t use it much, but it felt like a good thing to buy. It was costing me about £25 to buy and process a film. Then at Christmas I got all the kit I needed to processes my own films at home. I think I’ve shot about five times as much film in the past six months on my XPAN as I have in the last 5 years. Then last Tuesday I moved on to pin hole photography and 120 film.
Pinhole Photography is very much slow photography. Exposures starts to get measured in seconds and if you factor in reciporicty failure in your film seconds can become minutes (and hours). No automatic exposure, no auto focus, no point and shoot – this is pencil and paper, with a good measure of suck it and see thrown in for good measure.
Here are some of my first attempts shot at 6 x 12cm.
Garden Outhouse and Chair – Pinhole, Ilford FP4, f/158 @ 36 minutes (ish)
Pentrusco House, Knucklas, Powys – Pinhole, Ilford FP4, f/158 @ 4seconds(ish)
Iris, Cottage Garden – Pin Hole Photography, Ilford FP4, f/158 @ 4 seconds (ish)
Sunlight Dappled Woodland, – Pin Hole Photography, Ilford FP4, f/158 @ 1 minute 40 seconds (ish)
