On Sunday, April 29, 2012, people from all over the world took photos with "pinhole" cameras and posted them online in a digital gallery for the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day exhibition at www.pinhole day.org.
A pinhole camera can be as simple as a cardboard box with a hole punched in the side, to an expensive Nikon with the lens removed and replaced by a blank cap with a hole drilled in the center. Taking a picture with a pinhole camera harkens back to the earliest, crudest days of photography. You can't see the image while you take the picture. You can't focus the camera and you have no idea if it's going to be over-exposed, under-exposed, or just right. A lot of trial and error is involved.
To make the whole process even more interesting, the exposure time has to be at least a second...sometimes as much as five seconds. That is plenty of time for someone to walk into and out of your picture, for the wind to blow something out of place, or for a car to whiz by and smear a blur of light.
I took my pinhole photos in a one-day class at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. The instructor, John Hames first briefed us on the history of photography and the earlier discovery of pinhole images (upside down and backwards) going all the way back to Mo Ti in China in 400 B.C. The students went outside, took lots of pinhole photos and then returned to the classroom to designate our favorites and critique each other's best five shots.
We each chose a single photo to upload to the international collection.
My photo is of a building facade on Westminster Street in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Because the day was breezy, the leaves in front of the building blew around, creating a blur of green. A string of white lights in front of the building was dancing around too.
It's pretty cool that people all over the world were doing the same thing at the same time. So far, over 59 countries are represented in the project.
A pinhole camera can be as simple as a cardboard box with a hole punched in the side, to an expensive Nikon with the lens removed and replaced by a blank cap with a hole drilled in the center. Taking a picture with a pinhole camera harkens back to the earliest, crudest days of photography. You can't see the image while you take the picture. You can't focus the camera and you have no idea if it's going to be over-exposed, under-exposed, or just right. A lot of trial and error is involved.
To make the whole process even more interesting, the exposure time has to be at least a second...sometimes as much as five seconds. That is plenty of time for someone to walk into and out of your picture, for the wind to blow something out of place, or for a car to whiz by and smear a blur of light.
I took my pinhole photos in a one-day class at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. The instructor, John Hames first briefed us on the history of photography and the earlier discovery of pinhole images (upside down and backwards) going all the way back to Mo Ti in China in 400 B.C. The students went outside, took lots of pinhole photos and then returned to the classroom to designate our favorites and critique each other's best five shots.
We each chose a single photo to upload to the international collection.
My photo is of a building facade on Westminster Street in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Because the day was breezy, the leaves in front of the building blew around, creating a blur of green. A string of white lights in front of the building was dancing around too.
It's pretty cool that people all over the world were doing the same thing at the same time. So far, over 59 countries are represented in the project.
