Saturday, April 25, 2009

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is Coming!

That's not State-wide, or Nation-wide, but WORLD-wide, people. My friend Michelle updated me on this planetary event: Sunday, April 26 is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.


What is a pinhole camera? It can be almost any container (oatmeal box, Spam can, station wagon, even a digital camera) that you make light-tight that can hold a piece of film or photographic paper, that you expose with a pinhole. The results depend on the subject matter and the exposure but the one common denominator is wonderful depth-of-field. You can sometimes see for miles and miles with a pinhole print.

Photojojo has a far-reaching pinhole-camera primer with lots of samples of prints, homemade camera tutorials, and other helpful links. And Corbis has created some amazing (and probably complicated) PDFs of pinhole camera plans for you to print and put together.

In all my years of crafty endeavors I've NEVER made or shot anything with a pinhole camera. Shocking! Part of it is laziness. The cameras are very uncomplicated until it's time to load the film, then there's a lot of tweaking, tugging, taping and adjusting. No thanks. But the rest is gravy. I'd love to experiment with the form and see what happens. People are forgetting the thrill of getting the photos back from a roll of prints and seeing what happened. There was always a bit of mystery about photography, even with a professional shoot.

Bring some mystery to your life with pinhole photography. Or like me, don't bother because it's too time-consuming. Life is mysterious enough...

- Photo source: Matchboxpinhole.com.
- Flickr Pinhole Photography Group.
- The Best 15 Pinhole Shots from Flicker EVER!!

Source: Craftzine (and Michelle--thanks!)

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