I just stumbled upon 10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account which explains some of the reasons that I left Facebook and have not considered going back.
Sunday 25th April was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. People all over the world were out and about with homemade and commercial pinhole cameras.
A group of us from the Flickr Camera Camaraderie group met up outside the Hovercraft Terminal in Southsea and made our way toward Spice Island taking pictures.
I had two cameras with me: a Nikon D300 Digital SLR with a Lensbaby Pinhole / Zoneplate Optic and a Nikon F65 Film SLR with the bodycap pinhole that I mentioned the other day.
You don’t realise how long-winded it is taking pinhole photos unless you’ve done it. The pinhole lets through so little light that you cannot see anything through the viewfinder and hence cannot compose your picture, the pinhole has roughly the same angle of view as a 50mm lens, so you put a 50mm lens on the camera and compose your picture. Then you take that lens off and mount the pinhole instead and (in my case) get the exposure right by trial and error on the DSLR then set the same shutter speed on the film camera, swap that for the DSLR on the tripod and take a picture with that camera.
After a few pictures you get a feeling for the shutter speed you need based on the amount of light. 1/2 second to 1/5 second for bright sunshine 10 seconds inside the Square Tower (all at 400ASA). Why 400ASA? Well when I got my F65 film camera out that was what was loaded in it.
Of course you need to get your film developed, so it was off to Jessops in Fareham yesterday with my roll of film to see how the pictures had come out. When I went to collect the prints the conversation went:
Him: a lot of the pictures are out of focus
Me: they’re pinhole
Him: cool, well done with the exposure
Me: thanks
So, have a look at my photographs and see what you think.
the guy behind the counter said “a lot of them are out of focus@
Tags: Photography, pinhole
Just saw this: Sun`s path June to December « tweeted by @overheardatmoo. looks like a fun experiment to carry out this winter.
I went out to get the washing in off the line, as I was walking back inside with an armful of washing I noticed the image of the Flying Spaghhetti Monster in the sky.
I grabbed my camera and took this picture and then dashed in to upload it. By the timer I had done that and gone back outside to get the rest of the washing in it had disappeared.
It looks like my next door neighbour’s house has been touched by his noodly appendage 
I took some more pinhole photographs around work at lunchtime. None of them are at all sharp.
Reading up on this on the internet, the beauty of pinhole photography is that you get equally sharp pictures from close up all the way to infinity, but depth of field does not equal depth of focus (as you can see).
Somebody suggested using extension tubes to move the pinhole further from the sensor (as the ratio of pinhole size to distance to sensor is important for sharpness). I tried all combinations of my extension tubes when I got home and none of them made any difference (and to be honest the article I read said the same thing).
I suspect that the problem is that it is a digital sensor. The camera has a filter in front of the sensor so light needs to enter the filter (nearly) perpendicular, which is what you get from a conventional lens. But the light from the pinhole is coming from a single point and only the pixels near the centre of the frame will get light coming in perpendicular.
I might get the pinhole optic for my lensbaby and see if that is any better, but I suspect not.
Alternatively, I could get some film for my film SLR and use the pinhole on that. No working out the exposure by trial and error like I’ve been doing on the DSLR 
Tags: Photography, photos, pinhole
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