Words by Emily Steer.
If you’re also getting slightly sick of Facebook-style amateur photography – currently owing its boom in popularity to Blackberry photo apps – why not have a go with the real deal? We were very pleased with the recent discovery, courtesy of some procrastination on the web, of totally free, homemade pinhole cameras. Granted, you may feel like an excitable nine year old geek with Superglued fingers putting these together, but they take wonderful and totally individual shots and require only a working printer, a roll of 35mm film, some glue, and an old beer can to produce. Unlike a single-use camera, they can also be reused until they fall apart (although to be honest, given that they’re made of paper, that might not be that long!)
The shots can be pretty all over the place; slashes of light, varying degrees of focus and exposure characterize this kind of photography, but when it works right it beats Blackberry hipstamatic to the floor. Having tried out a couple, we found the key was to avoid being too fussy with it, and given that there’s no viewfinder, it’s a case of point and shoot and then hope for the best. Each camera will work differently from the next depending on the size of the pinhole, so if nothing else, your finished shots will be totally original. It also allows for stupidly long exposure times indoors – up to 10 minutes, if you can believe it – so you can write on the image with light, create a flattened moving image or even have a boogie about in front of it. Party lights and tube lights look especially superb, and landscapes and old buildings gain a ghostly distortion that is incredibly difficult to capture on digital.
Pinhole photography harks back to the dark ages and is most certainly a dying game in the age of digital manipulation, but we like to think that this truly creative way of capturing images can stay alive for a few years yet. Lest we forget, Barbara Ess is keeping pinhole alive and kicking on the art front, and of course flying the flag for homemade cameras is Miroslav Tichy whose Peeping Tom images of girls in his home town have earned him somewhat of a cult following.
Ten Paper Pinhole Designs (Click here)
