I looked forward to my holiday trip home to Maine, where people would ask me how I was doing and mean it. But I don’t like lobster, skiing or any other stereotypically Maine activities, and decided instead to spend my spare time trying some new things with photography. But I was still going to do it the Maine way: analogue, on the cheap, and by borrowing other people’s tools.
When he saw my new camera, Dad remembered his Pentax SLR of 20 years ago. We dug the old film camera out of his closet along with a third-party flash and a tripod, both of which I commandeered immediately. The tripod’s uses were obvious, but I didn’t know what to make of the flash. It couldn’t be fired wirelessly and it couldn’t turn or do anything else nifty while sitting on the camera.
With some ice and a measuring cup full of water, I stepped down to the darkened basement and finally put the flash to use. It was my first attempt at high speed photography, using the flash, not the shutter, to freeze the action. Since the only light in the exposure came from the flash, firing it just as the ice cube splashed into the measuring cup suspended the droplets in midair.
Later I tried something similar outside on falling snowflakes. The camera was focused almost cross-eyed close on the snowfall around me, the woods behind smudged. The shutter made a tiny smooch.
Click the photo to see an earlier attempt where I miss with the ice cube.
The flash exposes the snowflakes separately.
What else could I scrounge up in the name of unusual photography? From Dad, a drill; from Jeff, some gaffer tape; from Mom, a pin. With the drill, I bore a hole in my camera’s body cap, the plastic lid that protects the insides of the camera when there’s no lens attached. Then I covered the hole on the inside with gaffer tape. One careful poke in the tape and I had a pinhole lens.
Jeff couldn’t quite understand why I had taken a power tool to my new DSLR and essentially de-invented it to the tune of a hundred years. But lo-fi photography is very trendy right now. Part of it is the nostalgia inspired by shoddy cameras from Holga and Lomo (lo-fi shooting is often called “Lomography“), but honestly I think a lot of it has to do with those stupid apps that make it look like your cell phone shoots on old medium format. At only about half a millimeter wide, the pinhole’s crazy light diffraction gives the same the classic soft focus and unpredictable color, all without Instagram. I give you the 18 megapixel pinhole camera:
When you take it to the woods, it all comes out a bit Blair Witch.
14th street through the pinhole lens