Five weeks ago, I whiled away a Saturday afternoon cutting a piece of black plastic drainpipe into sections, drilling holes and sealing the ends to make three pinhole cameras. Now, I realise these may not be quite the most elegant cameras I’ve ever owned:
but I was focusing on function, not form.
Each of these tubes contained a piece of Ilford Multigrade IV black and white photographic paper, and with a bunch of cable ties, I secured them in various locations around the garden. Then, it was all a question of waiting – I managed five weeks before I caved in and brought them back in to see the results. All in all, I’m pretty pleased:
When you retrieve the image from the camera, it’s a negative, so the paper is scanned in and then inverted in Photoshop. The levels are then adjusted to show some of the detail. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with an old bit of pipe and a sheet of paper.
The images are quite small (the paper was cut to 5″ x 3 1/2″) due to the narrow diameter of the pipe. I think I need to find some that’s a little wider, at which point I’ll try this again – a six month exposure next, think.