MIDTONEGREY

For some years now, I have been making pictures with homemade pinhole cameras, created from household waste such as cardboard boxes, cake-tins and beer-cans. The images are recorded on photosensitive paper or film.

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For an introduction to pinhole cameras, see this post which I wrote back in 2020. In short, unlike most cameras which use a lens to form the image, pinhole cameras use a tiny hole. “Imperfection” is part of the pinhole aesthetic. Pinhole images tend to be blurry; not as sharp as an image formed by a good lens. They need long exposures – minutes, hours or even days – which lead to motion blur and other artefacts. Framing without a viewfinder often results in strange and unexpected compositions. Photosensitive paper – which I sometimes use as a photographic medium, instead of film – has limited dynamic range, and it can’t “see” (does not respond to) orange or red light.

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But all that said, there is something special about making a camera from scratch, and being able to produce images with such an extraordinarily simple device. Truth be told, I even like the imperfections. As Diana Pankova wrote, pinhole images can “turn the most common scenes and objects into something magical, revealing aspects of reality which are hidden to the human eye or other optical instruments.”

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This page shows some of my homemade pinhole cameras, and photos taken with these cameras. Click on images to view full-size, with captions and brief explanations.