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Worldwide Pinhole Day

Published April 14th, 2011 in D.I.Y., Pinhole Photography | No Comments »

I wanted to make a quick post and remind everyone that Sunday, 24 April 2011 is Worldwide Pinhole Day. This is a celebration of pinhole photography, where you (and thousands of others) get out and make a pinhole-camera image on one particular day; then submit it to the WWPD website. (There is also a less active Flickr group, too.)

The “perky pinhole.” Yes, it really works.

Longtime readers of Silverbased.org will know that pinhole photography is dear to my heart. (You can see some of my own pinhole images here. I have to admit that the pinhole mood strikes me randomly; I’ve been a bit erratic at observing the “official” date over the years.)

The other evening I saw some very beautiful work that a friend made using the Holga wide-angle pinhole camera. Still, I can’t help finding it preposterous that a hollow plastic box should cost almost sixty dollars. The whole beauty of pinhole cameras is that they’re so simple anyone can build one for themselves. All kinds of designs are possible, and Flickr’s Homemade Pinhole group will give you more inspiration. The only possibly-tricky aspect to building a camera is poking the pinhole itself, but my own how-to instructions should get you over that part if need be.

As part of my new Camera-wiki.org activities, I had a chance to completely revise our wiki article “Pinhole camera,” and add a new one, “Homemade pinhole camera.” The second article gives some general design guidance for pinhole cameras, but isn’t a step-by-step project like my posts here on Silverbased.

A few folks have seen the Pin-O-Rama design I did for MAKE magazine a few years ago. This is a pinhole camera which wraps 120 film around a curved film gate, giving an image 6×12 cm and more than 100° wide—the resulting photos are pretty entertaining. For some mysterious copyright-violating reason, the entire article is available as a PDF file here. But be sure to check out the errata on MAKE’s talkback page.

But whether you build something from scratch, hack up some old unused camera, or just go buy one of the commercial pinhole cameras now on the market, I hope this year you’ll give pinhole photography a whirl.

Pimp My Polaroid, Chapter Five: SX-70 Doubles

Published August 8th, 2008 in D.I.Y., Polaroid | 2 Comments »

In an earlier post, I showed how to modify a Polaroid OneStep camera so that you could take multiple exposures onto 600 film. Lately OneStep cameras have become so cheap and ubiquitous at thrift stores and on eBay that this is a creative way to reuse a few.

Yet there are a couple of problems with the OneSteps. First, most models were very basic, plasticky, fixed-focus cameras, not offering much versatility. The second problem is that their frame-counting mechanism locks the shutter after 10 shots. If you’re shooting multiple exposures onto each frame, at some point you’ll need to remove the film pack in a dark room to re-set the counter, which is inconvenient.

Polaroid’s SX-70 models were much more sophisticated than the OneSteps. They featured a compact, collapsible body, a good-quality glass lens, and true SLR focusing all the way down to 10″. However they’re a bit tricky to disassemble, so the “kill switch” mod I described earlier would be rather complicated to try on an SX-70.

Polaroid SX-70 vs. OneStep600

An SX-70—even a thrashed one like my white model 2—is a sleeker, nicer camera than any of Polaroid’s OneStep models.

But Flickr user amalia chimera called my attention to a YouTube video by her friend Brian (whose demonstration of double-exposures on a Spectra camera I had previously linked to). In a second video he shows a technique for fooling SX-70 cameras to make double-exposures possible.

Basically, the trick is this: An SX-70 has an interlock so that if the film door is open, the shutter and eject motor won’t operate. However by pressing the door-sensor lever with a narrow tool, you can take a shot even with the door open. Because the feed rollers are disengaged then, the print does not get ejected and developed. You can nudge the print back into the pack and make a second exposure.

An SX-70 does require an exposure adjustment to use 600 film. But that’s a minor problem. And I would much rather shoot with an SX-70 than a cheesy OneStep, so Brian’s technique really excited me. Plus, no permanent surgery to the camera was needed. So here’s a few refinements and additions to what Brian’s video shows.

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