Tuesday 24 February 2009

Pinhole Photography - What Landscapes?

As promised there is another great pinhole camera shot, which is not a wide-angle landscape! Just like most of the pictures I come across, I found it on Flickr.

Photo by DelioTO, February 2009.
The picture was taken with a 24 minutes exposure (12+12), while the guy was reading his morning newspaper. He says on his Flickr page that the aperture was f/250, which corresponds to a pinhole diameter of about 0.2mm (assuming the focal length was 50mm). This means that the pinhole is almost 45 times smaller than your aperture when shooting with a 50mm lens at f/5.6, which is quite amazing and makes the long exposure times possible! In the case of the pinhole camera the amount of light is further decreased due to the lack of a lens, which collects light and focusses it.

Admittedly, pictures of this kind are bound to be blurred or distorted in some ways. So one has to like this style. However, imagine what you can do with long exposure times like this! For instance, a whole motion sequence could be 'recorded' in one image. People who are watching you taking the picture would be entertained too by your slow motion pantomime play in front of a cardbord box.


Photo by DelioTO, February 2009.
How a pinhole camera looks like!

In case you always asked yourself why the hell a bigger f-number corresponds to a larger aperture, here's how you calculate it: f/5.6 really reads current focal length divided by 5.6 (or whatever the number is). Thus, if you are shooting with a 50mm lens at f/4, your aperture diameter will be 12.5mm. If you are shooting with 100mm at f/4, it will be 25mm. Hence, the amount of light increases if you use a longer focal length, or you decrease your f-number.

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