ULF Pinhole Camera for 16x20 film! The GarbageCam!

Asher,

As promised here is a link to a flickr slideshow. The fruits of the garbage can, will be posted later this week. I need to setup a copy stand at home to photograph the 16x20's the can produced.

Well I promised I would post some examples of the garbage camera images. A little bit of a setup to help define what your looking at...The images displayed are the negatives and is how they are displayed. Instead of using traditional film, being a poor college student, I opted for photographic multigrade fiber based B/W paper. The size of the neg is: 16x20in, iso 1, f-stop: f256, exposure time: 15 minutes on a bright sunny day.

Slide show link

Fascinating. now you just need a spirit level!

How did you choose the f stop? Did you relate it to the diameter of the barrel?

Asher

Agreed about the level....it would work well by wedging between the can (on its side) and the ground so the camera wouldn't then roll away. I based my fstop off of this equation.

Asher Kelman said:

Fascinating. now you just need a spirit level!

How did you choose the f stop? Did you relate it to the diameter of the barrel?

Asher

Click to expand...

Delightful. You inspire me toward pin hole-ness, but I think I'm going to try a digital pin hole with a pin hole body cap.

Thanks for sharing these with us

Is your pinhole a precision metal/foil, DIY, or a photographic pinhole?

Thanks,

Very neat, and I'm sure they're more impressive in person. I like the one with the Ball jar.

Have you tried contact printing them as positives?

Jay, that is totally awesome.

You are my hero!!

For v2, consider hooking up a photocopier to your garbage can so you can have a "scanning digital back"...

-Brad

Everyone,

Thanks for the comments....they inspire me to do more.

David, I have tried contact printing them, but in my eyes, it loses its appeal. I just guess I'm so used to looking/ viewing them as negatives that I have a personal hang-up inverting them.

Bradley, I like your idea about a photo copier and wonder if I could adapt an old flat bed scanner.

Charles, the pinhole was a DIY project. I had purchased a bunch of brass shim stock from a local hobby store and had some fine sewing needles laying around. So I hand milled the hole and sanded both sides to remove any burrs. Then from there I drilled a small hole into the garbage can and then mounted the pinhole over that.

David,

The neat thing about the Ball jar photo is since that is the negative and the pinhole camera sees everything upside down and backwards. It means that the ball jar was photographed with the Ball spelled llaB and the process flipped it. Completely unintentional when photographed but a happy accident in the end.

Jay, I really like your compositions on these, including something in the very near foreground, and making the b/g so interesting.

I had luck making my own pin-hole only once. It was in foil, on a cardboard camera that mounted to a 126 Instamatic film cartridge. The focal length was ~30mm, so the large diameter of the hole wasn't that important.

Thanks for sharing these with us.

Chas,

Thanks for the comments. It was a fun project and am trying to get back into it, though with an updated approach. I always liked putting foreground elements close. A prime example is the leafy (may apple) plant, if I remember correctly, it was about an inch away from the pinhole.

I had started photographing the may apples in early spring and I found out as the spring started turning into summer that the leaves on the trees started to "fill" in. My exposures started jumping from 12 minutes to an hour by the time I concluded the series....sometimes I wonder how some of these images maintained a sense of focus. All it takes to wreck a shot is a slight breeze....then either the plant would sway or the can would roll away down a hill. Eventually I wised up and "chocked" the can in place.

Side note another image from the project....NOT a pinhole but rather taken with a Canon Rebel (Film) with the lense flipped around and hand held against the camera body. The focus was racked way out and zoom was played with until the frame was composed of circles of confusion.