The Task
To begin with we had to bring in a box or something of the sort to act as our camera structure, I bought in a shoe box as I thought it was be easier to make into a pinhole camera. I then had to decide where to place my camera lens and I decided to place it on the back of the shoe box so the lid wouldn’t get in the way. After deciding where we wanted the lens to be we had to cut out a small square roughly about 1 inch by 1 inch, then we painted the inside of the box with black matt poster paint to ensure no light reflects inside the box, after letting the paint dry we taped a piece of foil over the the hole we had just cut out with gaffer tape, after taping that down to the box we made a pinhole in the foil and that is now the full camera lens. Then we made a bigger square out of cardboard to create what would act as a shutter and taped it down over the lens but not too tightly so that we could take it off when ready to take a photo and put it back on when we had left it exposed for long enough.
So after all of the creating of the box which is now a camera and no longer a box, we had to figure out the f-stop so that we knew how long to leave it exposed, we used the distance between pinhole and back of box divided by diameter of pinhole as the formula to work out the f-stop. The pinhole was roughly 0.8mm and the width of my box was 197mm so that means I had to leave it exposed for 2 minutes when outside but 10 minutes when inside.
So finally after making the camera and figuring out the f-stop it was time to go into the dark room and attach the photographic paper into the box, we had to go into the dark room because photographic paper is light sensitive, we had to put two small pieces of doubled sided tape inside the box on the opposite side of the lens so that we could stick our paper to it, after everything being in place we had to close the box and completely tape it up so that absolutely no light would enter it and ruin the photographic paper, after ensuring every single hole was taped up we were ready to take our photos.
I then took my camera outside and took off the shutter being careful to tape it back so that it wouldn’t close halfway through exposure and left it pointing at something for 2 minutes. After that I securely put my shutter back on and returned to the dark room, untaped my box and put the piece of photographic paper into three trays which were filled with developing chemicals, then into the fourth one which was just water to wash all of the developing chemicals off. Then I had to decide if I was happy with the result or not, if I was then I dried it off in the drying machine and kept it, if I wasn’t happy with the result I could either decide to keep it as a practice photo or just put it straight into the bin. After all of this, it was time to take another picture, so we start with this whole process again, beginning at the point of placing a piece of photographic paper into the box.
Scanning:
Once all of my photos were developed we had to scan them into the computer and to do this we had to:
To begin with we had to bring in a box or something of the sort to act as our camera structure, I bought in a shoe box as I thought it was be easier to make into a pinhole camera. I then had to decide where to place my camera lens and I decided to place it on the back of the shoe box so the lid wouldn’t get in the way. After deciding where we wanted the lens to be we had to cut out a small square roughly about 1 inch by 1 inch, then we painted the inside of the box with black matt poster paint to ensure no light reflects inside the box, after letting the paint dry we taped a piece of foil over the the hole we had just cut out with gaffer tape, after taping that down to the box we made a pinhole in the foil and that is now the full camera lens. Then we made a bigger square out of cardboard to create what would act as a shutter and taped it down over the lens but not too tightly so that we could take it off when ready to take a photo and put it back on when we had left it exposed for long enough.
So after all of the creating of the box which is now a camera and no longer a box, we had to figure out the f-stop so that we knew how long to leave it exposed, we used the distance between pinhole and back of box divided by diameter of pinhole as the formula to work out the f-stop. The pinhole was roughly 0.8mm and the width of my box was 197mm so that means I had to leave it exposed for 2 minutes when outside but 10 minutes when inside.
So finally after making the camera and figuring out the f-stop it was time to go into the dark room and attach the photographic paper into the box, we had to go into the dark room because photographic paper is light sensitive, we had to put two small pieces of doubled sided tape inside the box on the opposite side of the lens so that we could stick our paper to it, after everything being in place we had to close the box and completely tape it up so that absolutely no light would enter it and ruin the photographic paper, after ensuring every single hole was taped up we were ready to take our photos.
I then took my camera outside and took off the shutter being careful to tape it back so that it wouldn’t close halfway through exposure and left it pointing at something for 2 minutes. After that I securely put my shutter back on and returned to the dark room, untaped my box and put the piece of photographic paper into three trays which were filled with developing chemicals, then into the fourth one which was just water to wash all of the developing chemicals off. Then I had to decide if I was happy with the result or not, if I was then I dried it off in the drying machine and kept it, if I wasn’t happy with the result I could either decide to keep it as a practice photo or just put it straight into the bin. After all of this, it was time to take another picture, so we start with this whole process again, beginning at the point of placing a piece of photographic paper into the box.
Scanning:
Once all of my photos were developed we had to scan them into the computer and to do this we had to:
Photocopier:
Step 1: Log onto the photocopier by swiping my card
Step 2: Click on send
Step 3: Click send to myself
Step 4: Select file format of JPEG
Step 5: Click the green button on the dashboard
Step 6: Check my email
Step 7: Use Photoshop to invert my images.
Flatbed Scanner:
Step 1: Log on to computer
Step 2: Open Photoshop
Step 3: Click on import from the drop down bar
Step 4: Choose scanner
Step 5: A preview screen appears
Step 6: Select the image I want
Step 7: Click Scan
Step 8: Save picture onto my USB key, in JPEG format.
Photoshop:
Once all of our photos were all uploaded onto the computer, we had to open them onto photoshop to try out different editing styles but to mainly crop and invert the photos, some of the photos were upside down so we had to rotate them, then we cropped them, then we inverted them because they were in negative. Once our photos were all edited we had to save them in JPEG format and save them to our USB key to that we can access our photos from any computer.
Evaluation
In this evaluation I will be discussing what I've learnt from making and using a pinhole camera, why I found it interesting in some parts but not in others and what problems I faced and what I did to solve them.
There are lots of different genres of photography including, commercial, fashion, nature, paparazzi, still life and wedding, but these are only a few. Pinhole photography has played a massive part in film and photography today as it was the first type of photography around dating back to 4th Century BC.
From making a pinhole camera I've learnt that it's the basics of photography and that without it we wouldn't have been able to create digital camera's we have today, even on our mobile phones, which are a lot more efficient and faster to use, and can be used almost instantly to send to friends or upload to the internet. I really enjoyed experiencing pinhole photography as I was really amazed at the fact that light going through a pinhole can make a picture. I loved the whole process of creating the camera, down to waiting around while we waited for the required exposure times, I liked using the dark room and all of the chemicals because it was interesting to see the photo develop infront of my eyes. The only part I didn't like was the fact that I had to keep taping up and untaping my box inside the dark room and it was very difficult and frustrating to keep doing because at one point I had just sat down to take a photo and realised I'd left a big hole untaped on the side of the box and completely overexposed the photographic paper and had to go back and redo it all over again. I took 5 photos, 2 became overexposed, 1 became underexposed and the other 2 were good but there was only 1 photo I was genuinly pleased with as it actually looked like it was taken with a digital camera. Two of them became overexposed because the first darkroom I used the light was too bright in there, the second one that became overexposed was the one I didn't tape up properly, the 1 that became underexposed I was a bit confused about because I still left it for 2 minutes when outside like I did with the other outside photo and that one came out fine. The two that did come out successfully I was very pleased about and can be seen on the right hand side of this blog post.
In conclusion I was very happy with this project and would happily do it again, I enjoyed practically every part of it and was fascinated by the whole concept of it. I don't believe I came over too many problems and the ones I did I come across I sorted out straight away without too much stress. I learnt from the mistakes I made and if I were to do this project again I would consider the exposure times more carefully to make sure I got the best photos. All in all I am happy with my final photos and would happily do this again.
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