Last week I shot with frequent collaborator Rachel Luree and made a range of ghosty images, including some digital pinhole images. If you’re unfamiliar with pinhole photography, it’s essentially any light-tight object with photo sensitive material inside and a tiny hole which acts as the aperture. An entire room can then be a pinhole camera (see camera obscura). I’ve made pinhole cameras out of LEGO, oatmeal boxes, film canisters, and cigarette tins. While each iteration has offered unique results, exploring digital pinhole has been a quicker and easier experience by far.
The pinhole lens (which I purchased on ebay) is just a body cap with a hole drilled out and a piece of metal glued in place, with a tiny pin-hole in the center. The pinhole diameter is 0.28mm, which translates roughly to f/157. It has three extension tubes (7mm, 14mm, 28mm) which can be used independently or all together to change the lens from a wide angle to a zoom. Using only body cap is the widest angle— likely a 20mm equivalent on the full frame sensor. Adding a the 7mm and 14mm extensions made it 50mm or so. Adding numbers all three extension tubes made it approximately 100mm. Note that the longer the lens is the more light is lost, meaning you have to compensate your exposure. My camera’s ISO maxes out at 32,000 and I obviously can’t open the aperture anymore, so my only option was to lower my shutter speed from 1/100 to 1/50. Considering we were shooting in full sunlight I’d need to use a camera with a higher ISO or bring a tripod if it was a cloudy day or shot indoors.
After wrapping the pinhole set we returned to my studio to explore creating ghosty images via a different technique. I had Rachel stand behind a silk scrim, which I lit and shot two different ways. The first was lit with an LED from the side of the model, which cast her shadow sideways onto the scrim. The second was lit with a strobe behind her, which cast her shadow forward onto the scrim. I then pulled down the white point in the tone curve in Lightroom to give the image a solarized look.
