Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is coming up this Sunday, April 26th. All the relevant information is on their website, this year’s event is all virtual, there will be no public gathering to celebrate the event, due to the ongoing insanity that is the world these days.
It’s still a great opportunity, if you have a pinhole camera, or an adapter for your digital camera to get out and practice this pure form of photography. If you don’t have a camera but want to participate it’s pretty easy to make a camera with common items around the house. Typing “how to make a pinhole camera” in your favorite search engine will provide you with more information than a person would need to make a camera.
A little history with the aid of Wikipedia, the camera obscura or pinhole image is a natural optical phenomenon. Descriptions of the camera obscura are found in ancient Chinese writings from around 500BC and in ancient Greek writings from about 300 BC
Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab physicist was the first to thoroughly study and describe the camera obscura effect around 1000 AD. Over the centuries others started to experiment with it, mainly in dark rooms with a small opening in shutters, mostly to study the nature of light and to safely watch solar eclipses.
The first known description of pinhole photography is found in the 1856 book The Stereoscope by Scottish inventor David Brewster, including the description of the idea as "a camera without lenses, and with only a pin-hole".
I have a small collection of ONDU pinhole cameras I have acquired a various times and I don’t use them as often as I should, I’ll be using at least one of them this weekend to make some photographs in celebration of Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.
I’ve included a few samples of my past pinhole photography in a small gallery below and I do have a series of Pinhole photographs that was published in SEITIES magazine in the Macabre Edition back in 2015, you can see those photographs here.
I like all kinds of photography, but the back to basics nature of pinhole photography and the look I can get from the negatives is kind of magic, at least for me.
Enjoy!
Dean.
