Pinhole cameras: a simple device that gives you the whole picture

IN AN age where most people will carry at least one digital camera to fire off whenever they like, there’s a movement to reclaim the art of one of the simplest forms of photography, the pinhole camera

ON a sunny afternoon Mr Bean likes to take his wheelie bin to the beach at Portobello. Like a cumbersome child, the black behemoth is loaded into the back of his car and together they tootle down the road. Once there he unloads the bin and then drags it across the sands to a spot he considers suitably scenic, where the wheelie bin proceeds to take a photograph. While surrounding families can use digital cameras or their phones to fire off dozens of pictures in seconds, the bin takes longer, a good 20 minutes, so by the time that Bailey the Bin has got his shot, for Bean “the water is lapping around my ankles”.

For the avid practitioner of pinhole photography, the brilliance and ubiquity of modern cameras – with their megapixel auto-focused images – has robbed the beauty and mystery from the photographic image. Like those who favour vinyl over downloaded music, the pinhole enthusiast harks back to a simpler time, when all that was required to create a photographic image was a darkened space, a piece of light sensitive paper and the miracle of a pinprick to let the light in.

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“Taking digital pictures is just a tad too easy now,” says Kenny Bean, a creative photographer who has fashioned cameras out of biscuit tins and drainpipes as well as his friendly neighbourhood wheelie bin.

“For years I studied in college and learned film photography and I was trying to get the perfect photograph, and now you can pick up a phone and just click and get a near perfect picture straight away. There is much less involvement. With pinhole photography you are right in at the basics. You have to learn from the start, from light-sensitive materials, to doing your own exposures, to making your own cameras. You can make cameras out of all sorts of things as long as it is a sealed box. You can make a camera out of an Easter egg.”

In Scotland an increasing number of photographers are going back to basics and experimenting with the images created by homemade pinhole cameras. To celebrate this exciting new trend and encourage others to embrace photography at a simple and wondrous level, Bean this week launched the first Pinhole Photography Festival, which runs until 16 March at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Each morning, classes of schoolchildren have been taught how to make a simple camera from a cardboard box, and are then set free among the gardens to capture the flora and fauna.

In the afternoons, enthusiasts gather to discuss technique and camera design, and for the curious and uninitiated there is an exhibition of the strange, sometimes spectral images created by pinhole cameras.

For Susan Kelpie, the school programme manager of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the idea was a brilliant one. “Over the years we have worked with Kenny Bean on a number of projects and when he contacted us to say he wanted to do an exhibition of pinhole photography we knew it would be brilliant. We also know that the space is appropriate for what he is trying to do. It is a fairly quiet time for us so we thought, ‘Well, let’s go for it,’ and its been very popular.”

The organic nature of pinhole photography is also complemented by the surroundings. Kelpie says: “The gardens are a brilliant place to take pictures and as the festival is designed around education it very much works with education and the outdoors. It is just excellent. The workshops for children in the morning have gone very well and they are going outdoors to take their pictures and they also get to experience the gardens.”

The knowledge that when light passes through a small hole and into a dark space it projects an inverted image of what is directly outside was first recorded in China in the 5th century BC, and Ibn al-Haytham published the Book of Optics in 1021 AD, in which he explained that the smaller the pinhole the sharper the image. The person who combined this knowledge with photosensitive paper and took the first pinhole photograph was Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist who also invented the kaleidoscope, and became so famous his face appeared on a cigar box.

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Bean, 47, has no desire to see his face on a cigar box, but is keen to promote pinhole photography. He got his first camera, an Agfa, when he was 14, and turned his bedroom into a darkroom. Now a photography graduate of the College of Building and Printing in Glasgow, he began to experiment with the form about five years ago and created the wheelie bin camera by sticking photosensitive paper inside the bin and drilling a small hole on the front. He believes the nature of photography is changing

“With digital photography, people are not thinking about the image they are trying to take. As it is quick and fast people are spending less and less time making good pictures. Cameras take great pictures but the people are not taking the time to look.

“Cameras used to have a roll of film for just 36 pictures, so you wouldn’t fire them off quickly. You would sit there, focus, line it up, make sure the lighting was correct. Then you would take it. Today you point and press and if it doesn’t work you take another five.

“There seems to be a kick back against digital photography and a real return to analogue photography and an interest in film and plastic cameras and pinhole cameras, that is why I set up the festival because there was this real interest in analogue photography, which seems a bit strange. You feel its addictive nature and so you can understand why people are getting more involved.”

He recently made a camera out of a drainpipe. “The paper goes inside the pipe so the image is 180 degrees. You get massive wide-angle pictures. Part of the appeal of pinhole photography is that you can’t predict what the image will be. With a digital camera it is on the screen, but with pinhole you just have to point it and wait. There is a level of surprise. When you see the pictures rising up from the chemicals there is nothing like it.”

Among the photographers whose work is on display is Mark Tweddie, who started using pinhole cameras six or seven years ago: “It was out of curiosity about how they worked and what unusual visual results they could produce. What struck me straight away was how interesting and unusual hey made even very ordinary and mundane items appear. Their strange perspectives and blurry effects really intrigued me, but what made me take it seriously was that the results were consistently more striking and had more visual depth than images made with standard, lensed cameras.”

Perhaps the most striking images in the exhibition were taken by Justin Quinnell using his “mouth” camera which he calls a Smileycam. He traces his fascination back to his childhood, when he had several operations on his eyes and, at one point, wore a patch on one eye with a small hole to see through. Later, as head of photography in poor area of Bristol, he explored it as a cheap option to cameras. “The kids couldn’t afford cameras, but could afford several cans of coke every day, so I got them to make cameras out of drink cans and gradually got hooked myself. It was at a time when I was getting disillusioned with my own photography and was looking for something less commercial.

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“Digital cameras are easy. Although an empty container with a hole is incredibly simple, it’s not easy. Gadgets are fine but where’s the wonder?

“Where’s the ‘How does that work?’ Many gadgets seem to be just automated distraction with opportunity removed. There’s no ‘unexpected accident’ function on a digital camera. I did a beer can camera workshop with some kids a few months ago and one kid asked, ‘Where does the memory card go?’ As long as there is the ability to find wonder in light through a small hole forming an image, people will play with pinhole.”

• Edinburgh Pinhole Photography Festival at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh runs until 16 March

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