The White River and Northern Model Railroad: Clinic

	The N Scale

	Model Railroad

Click for larger image and detailed description

Pinhole Photography

A Retrospective, Part 1 of 2

Before launching into an in-depth exploration of pinhole photography, it's important to make a distinction between two flavors of the technique—a detail often overlooked in most literature on the subject. Also, bear in mind that gray areas exist when describing pinhole photography because terminology is often used inconsistently, and there are virtually no "standards" applied to what is essentially a hobby.

First, there's "traditional" pinhole photography, which involves three items: A light-tight box, a piece of film, and a pinhole. There is no lens, and usually the shutter is nothing more than a flap placed over the pinhole. The pinhole acts as the lens as well as the aperture, and requires no focusing—in fact, there is no focal plane. Photography at its simplest!

Aside from being incredibly economical, the principal advantage of this technique is that the depth of field is, for all practical purposes, very nearly infinite. On the downside, pinholes create "soft" images. The photographer does have some degree of control here: the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image; however, smaller pinholes require substantially longer exposures. Also, there is no way to compose the image—what you get is what you get. And determining correct exposure times (usually in the range of minutes) is often accomplished by trial and error. Finally, handling the film in total darkness is a challenge; it is better suited for those who do their own processing.

Tangentially to all of this is another technique more accurately termed "pinhole aperture photography." The distinction is that, rather than being used on its own, the pinhole is instead installed within a normal camera lens to produce ultra-small apertures, significantly enhancing the depth of field—which is what makes it so desirable for model photography.

My approach was as simple as one could imagine: I taped a piece of aluminum foil over the front of the camera lens and poked it in the center with a pin. Because the aperture was positioned in front of the lens, instead of at the aperture plane, vignetting resulted—that is, the image was surrounded by a black circle. As long as this was taken into account when composing the image, cropping would correct the flaw. (Most of the image pages have unprocessed versions of the original photos for comparison.)

I made my first pinhole aperture photos with a Polaroid camera using both black-and-white and color film. In spite of the vignetting, the images were amazingly realistic—if disappointingly fuzzy. The focus problem was due as much to the crude pinhole as to the fact that the camera had no tripod mount or cable release, and was usually perched on an unstable stack of boxes and books. Later, I switched to a Canon 35-mm SLR on a tripod, and the results were predictably better, though still far from ideal—the last four images at left were taken this way.

All of the images reproduced here were digitally manipulated to varying degrees. However, modifications were restricted to cropping, colorizing, dust and scratch removal, and replacing pictures hanging on the wall behind the layout with simulated sky. None of the modeling was enhanced.

Continue to Part 2
Return to Chapter 3
Return to Clinics Index