City of Rocks - Part 2

The pinhole.  Amazingly this primitive camera has yet to be named by Bridget.  There is nothing special about a pinhole camera in the sense of components and structure.  It is a box with a pin-size hole on one end and film on the other.  No glass no shutter and just a fixed F-Stop.  You can buy manufactured pinhole cameras or even just pieces of metal with machine drilled holes, but in a world of digital cameras with exacting matrix-meters and camera raw files that can retrieve information from the depths of 14 bit wells, there is something chaotic and haphazard about a camera that uses a #10 needle hole in a Nestle Quick lid.

I built my camera while I was still in school for photography.  I shot with it quite a bit for a short while.  Once I realized that it was not going to be an aspect of my commercial portfolio the camera was shelved.  Over the last six years it has seen very little use. 

Early Polaroid Tests behind Bridget's apartment

 

 

 

Choosing to shoot film right now is daunting.  Professional labs are disappearing daily.  New Mexico has one professional lab - Visions Photo Lab - in Santa Fe.  So the concept of patience is taking a whole new meaning for me.  I used to hate the anxiety of developing film myself.  Between getting the chemicals the right temperature and then watching the clock for each step then drying an cutting and sleeving and blah blah blah.  I just could not move fast enough.  Then I had a local lab do it for me and that was at least bearable.  Now I send my film to Santa Fe and it takes basically a week to see the results...  Developing my own film is starting to look real appealing again.  

Observation Point #1

Hoover Rock

 

The Outcropping

Observation Point # 2

We shot these on our last day at the park.  While they are excellent executions of pinhole photography there is some room to improve.  Cloudless skies leave much to be desired.  Just the few wisps in the lower photograph up its excitement value dramatically and its by far the least interesting of the four.  As you can see from my previous post we had clouds all the time.  Just not when we decided to shoot the pinhole.  Also next time I will shoot using a red filter.  It ups the exposure time by 2 to 2.5 stops but it should bring the sky down in value.

The image quality is soft and dreamy at best.  There is a sweet spot in my depth of field but its much closer to the pinhole and even then its not super sharp.

 Detail Example - Click to Enlarge

I'm glad I dusted it off and took it for another run in the wild.  It will definitely be a staple when traveling by car!