Found Treasure

Recently, while looking for an item in the analog department for a customer, I saw a product that I had almost forgotten about. It was Rising’s Pinhole adapter for a Canon camera. Rising was a company that made Pinhole Obscura Adapters for various cameras, Canon, Nikon, Pentax and even micro four thirds. These have been, and can still be used on film or digital cameras. Basically, these are camera body caps that have a metal center with a pinhole stamped or drilled out. They also made a wide and wide-vignetting version.

I thought to myself that this would be a fun idea for a blog and a change from the other blogs I have written in the past. I have had little to no experience photographing with a pinhole other than seeing art work from some artists and reading a few articles about it. So, to gather some inspiration I turned to the internet. Of course, most of those showing their work online are using hand made pinhole cameras for film or paper but there are lots of amazing images out there so I was encouraged to proceed. I had not used my Canon 5D Mk II for a while so I thought I would charge up the batteries and try the adapter on it. I figured this experiment would involve longer exposures so I made sure my trusty tripod was at hand.

Day 1,

I brought the Rising Pinhole adapter home in the evening, and not having any idea of what I would get, I decided I’d start with something simple and at hand. I saw some beautiful zucchini blossoms in our garden the previous day so I decided that is where I would begin. I had to get up rather early as zucchini blossoms don’t stay open all that long and are at their peak early in the morning. There was no information on exposure times that came with this pinhole adapter, so I knew there was going to be some guess work involved. Also I could not frame the image using my view finder as it was completely black so I  had to judge the angle the camera was pointed at and adjust once I could see an image on the back of the LCD screen.  I started with a one second exposure and ISO 100, but I got a black image so I proceeded with the trial-and-error method and various exposure times and ISO speeds.

I started to get something that resembled a decent image. After a few more adjustments the exposure was acceptable but the images on the back of the LCD screen of camera were not what I expected. They looked much softer than the other pinhole images I had seen online and at Beau Photo. Not to say I wasn’t getting some interesting images, but there didn’t appear to be any sharp areas so it was more of a dreamy image.  I then started experimenting with the distance to the subject I was photographing. I didn’t see much or really any change. Close or far, there was no significant difference in sharpness.

Day 2.

I had a thought that perhaps a longer exposure might offer some improvements in getting some sharper results. As I said earlier this was going to be an exploration of pinhole photography by trial and error, and I didn’t want to do too much research, as it would take away some of the a-ha feeling when you discover something on your own, (which is different from the a-ha I discovered). So, I started experimenting with a circular polarizer and moved up to 3 and 6 stop ND filters. A 10-stop filter would have been a bit too long of an exposure for me to hold the filter in front of the adapter for that long and not bump the camera or plant I was photographing. These adapters are like body caps and have no front thread, perhaps a design flaw, but it is much too late for my great design change suggestion. Either way the results were not as I hoped for, and while there was some improvement in colour saturation, I did not see any improvements in a sharper image.

What I did learn this day is that you have to be very aware when shooing in the direction of the sun as lens flare is quite extreme, and with the longer exposure, subject blur is part of the experience when photographing small flowers when a breeze blows through. In  this case I  thought it added to the overall image.

When I returned to work, I spoke to Kathy, Beau Photo’s resident pinhole expert about what I was doing for my blog this month. She told me that she has also had slightly soft results with digital cameras compared to film. Her theory about pinhole effects on a digital camera sensor is that the light that goes through the pinhole is spread out at an acute angle and also diffracted when it hits the sensor and since sensors are not really flat like film, the images are soft. Camera lenses redirect light so it hits the sensor at an optimum angle,  rendering a sharp image on a sensor. What I really wanted to try was to bring the adapter further away from the image plane to see if I could get a sharper image. So, with an extension tube in hand, I was off to try to get an image I was happy with.

Days 3 & 4.

I decided to venture out in to the garden once more to see what I might get with the addition of the extension tube on the camera with the pinhole adapter. I also thought that if the extension tube worked, why not my 2X tele extender and the extension tube? But it only gave me an error message asking me to clean the contacts on the lens, so extension tube alone it was to be. Not to say I didn’t get any useable images but I did not find any areas that were particularly sharper. That said, I only had the use of an extension tube EF 12, so not a great distance away from the front of the camera, perhaps a longer extension tube would have produced a more noticeable result. Also, I started photographing in the evening as a breeze was picking up, not great for long exposure flower photography. The next day in the morning, I wanted to try again before I had to leave for work so I took some photos of plants less likely to be blowing in the wind. Again, I was not being very scientific about this experiment, like measuring distance to subject, making notes, etc.  but here are some final images for you to look at to see my results. There is still more work to be done and perhaps I will need to compare it to the results on a film camera.

As a note. All images are jpegs right out of the camera. A couple had slight adjustments so you could see the image better, except the B&W converted images.