Sunday was World Wide Pinhole Day: around the world, pinhole photographers made images and are now posting them at the WWPD website. I was set to teach a workshop at Photographic Center NW on pinhole photography with John Blalock, one of the greats. But as luck and finances would have it, the workshop was canceled due to lack of signups. I think people have these ideas about Pinhole Photography: that it should be mostly free, that it is easy and fun and largely done with recycled materials and alternative papers and films. All of the above are true, exept that it is not easy-it is always challenging and the unexpected creeps in and in the final reckoning, I never capture what I thought I was seeing. I make mainly long exposure pinhole on film and maybe it is the time I have to contemplate the image in my head that makes it so different from the reality that I have seen. I am not complaining. It is good to be surprised and to lose some of the "control" we think we have over art and life. In fact, there is no real control and those who think they have it make images that are devoid whimsy and chance, the two most exciting elements in photography for me.
So many great things have been happening with the Pinhole Project, and I am really really behind in posting images! I will give you some hints: several students at Bainbridge High School made multiple hole cameras, exposing the holes in different places for different amounts of time. The cameras were old colored pencil tins, very wide angle. Four students went together and made a panoramic pinhole that exposed in the four cardinal directions in four separate containers. They then took those images and working together with Photoshop made an amazing panorama. I post some here along with my World Wide Pinhole Day images.
Multi hole pinhole camera by Tia Preston
Multi hole pinhole camera by Bryna Ross
Multiple hole pinhole camera by Theo Hytopoulos
Panoramic Pinhole by Sean Lindsey, Theo Hytopoulos, Akio Hansen and Jarrah TomasovichSturgeon
90 Day pinhole exposure by Janet Neuhauser (between the curtains and the vellum covered windows) Taken down on World Wide Pinhole Day.
Taken on World Wide Pinhole Day by Janet Neuhauser: holga pinhole cap on a Nikon DSLR.