My First Worldwide Pinhole Day

April 27^th, 2014 was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, and since I had never taken a pinhole photograph before Nicole and Kathy convinced me to give it a try! So with the Holga 120 wide pinhole camera and a roll of Lomo 400 film in hand, I set out with my dog, Hudson, on a walk through the park.

It was a pretty sunny day, but spring has sprung and the trees with their full leaves provided quite a bit of coverage on the pathway through the park. So for most of the exposures my shutter speed ranged between 1-2 seconds with the exception of one image that was closer to 3 seconds, in a particularly dark area of the park. I tried using a mini Gorilla Pod for a tripod but found it to be still a bit bouncy, so at times I also just held the camera as close to my body as possible for stability and shot away. This worked with mixed results, but I managed to get some reasonably sharp images, which I was quite excited by! I also tried to shoot a mix of close up images of flowers and further away photos of the whole pathway.

The one thing I didn’t realize about the camera, or take into account while I was shooting anyway, was that it was a WIDE format. Never having done this before or having used the camera at all, I just happily advanced away on the film, lining the numbers up in the back window as you usually would. Somewhere near the end of the roll I started to think, I don’t think I’m supposed to get this many exposures with a roll of 120 film or on a wide format camera…and I wasn’t. This resulted in basically one continuous photo, with no spacing between frames at all and many of them overlapping. I didn’t necessarily mind this at all though! Because it was all the same sort of subject matter, the overlaps seem to work out quite well. The green foliage nicely just runs together, with a few surprise vertical images showing up in the middle. I think my favorite images, if I could pick out a section of this giant long negative, would be the close up shot of the flowers and there’s a nice spot where a shot of the pathway turned out quite sharp. The only part I was a bit disappointed with the overlap was where I had taken a shot of the creek and accidentally overlapped with a vertical image of the trees. I really was hoping for a bit of water motion.  All in all, I had a lot of fun shooting with the pinhole and was pleasantly surprised with my results! I will definitely give it another try and see if I can get some water motion on my little creek.

If you took a pinhole photo on April 27^th, make sure you go to http://www.pinholeday.org/ and upload your images!

Here’s one of my favourite shots!

To see more check out our Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beauphotostore/