Pinhole Perspectives or Chew your food 30 times.

Everyday, myself and thousands of others, drift down to a local Food Court to all too quickly fill our stomachs with everything from Greek to Italian food. We enjoy the San Diego weather while downing our Thai chicken (“Thai hot, thank you.”) yet so many people miss the incredible architecture and energy that surrounds us.

Things can easily get downright complicated including life (and food choices) in general. We are in the midst of a major “downturn” economically and even our outlook on the world can get pretty jaded. Art imitates life or vice versa (I never did get that one down), but like Henry David Thoreau, we all need to take an occasional breather and “Simplify. Simplify.”

Photography is no different. We too often get overwhelmed by technology and its attendant aberrations. Take a look, for example at some of the incredibly complex work being turned out by today’s photographers. Wow! (When do they have time to do this stuff?) These up and coming young lions are producing images of stunning quality and yet, there is something to be said for simplicity. The line between art and photography is blurring all the time.

Maybe I’m just getting too old, but one of my passions is sitting back on the sofa with a good photography book and just thumbing through the pages and rediscovering Ansel Adams, Matthew Brady, William Bell and Timothy O’Sullivan. Just slowing my life down and smelling the roses. While their photographic equipment was far from simple, their photographs (“captures” in today’s jargon) were stunning samples of simplicity itself.

It’s no wonder that pinhole photography, photography without lenses, has seen such a surge of late. While it’s been around as long as photography, it is pure simplicity. There are no lenses to “fool with,” memory cards to lose or back up drives to worry about. It’s just film. Good old fashioned film inside a box. But, more than that, pinhole photography makes the photographer slow down and change his perspective. Pinhole cameras, depending upon their “focal length,” typically have f/stops in the 135 to 295 range. Therefore, depth of field becomes incredibly deep and exposures become conversely long.

My 120 Zero 2000, for example, has an f/stop of 135 (and an angle of view of about 24 degrees). My 4x5 has an f/stop of roughly f/235 with two extensions. Exposures run in the 30 second to 5 minute range on overcast days or interior light. Reciprocity rears itself in these ranges, too. Strange things begin to happen. Motion (call it blurring) begins to become something magical, not at all the “Darn, my subject moved.” Instead, we actually search out the movement of time that can be captured by these cameras on a single exposure.

If we go back and look at the Civil War era photographs of the Matthew Brady troupe, we see these “mistakes” of Lincoln blurred, a soldier’s ghostly battlefield movements, trees swaying in the foreground and all of this giving us a sense of, well perspective. It is in many ways poetic and timeless history alive, in motion and simplified.

That same perspective is being captured today with pinhole cameras. Some of these cameras are little gems of engineering. Others, for the purist pinhole practitioner, are examples of making anything into a pinhole camera. I have seen cameras made from old books whose pages have been glued together, carved out and a hole drilled for a pinhole to cameras made from human skulls! But, within all this low tech art is one similarity, the photographs they take.

One must actually consider things like light. No PhotoShop needed! (That, in itself is kind of a freeing experience). We find ourselves starting to re-discover perspectives we never considered before. The near/far relationships that make us consider different aspects and points of view. Trees become mystical ghosts. Moving water becomes fairy tale mists. Buildings and points of view change.

One day at lunch, I decided to take my Zero 2000 6x6 pinhole out and just walk around the buildings. You begin to realize that you are probably the only person actually out admiring the scenery. Everyone else is scurrying from office to sidewalk, grabbing a quick smoke, bite to eat or chatting about anything but the economy. And, here I am with this little box and mini tripod, taking pictures. I feel like the proverbial “you can tell a tourist because he is always looking up” guy. Just taking it all in.

It really does change one’s perspective. I feel like Cartier-Bresson must have felt capturing life as it happens, in the “mean streets.” I actually like carrying my camera and making 3 second exposures while the iPhone fanatics are snapping pictures that will be forever stored on a chip being viewed occasionally by a co-worker. Something wrong with this picture, pardon the pun.

A funny side note is here I am with my little wooden box and a security guard questions me “What are you doing?”

“Taking lo tech pictures,” I explain waiting for him to ask “Is that a camera?” which he doesn’t. He’s too wrapped up in his complicated world.

“Well, no signage. Just doing my job.” And he walks away having accomplished little in securing our borders, I’m afraid. I continued taking my pictures.

Hundreds of people take pictures on their cell phones of the same scene and he probably never even noticed. Life really is odd…and complicated.

Everyday life becomes not so… well, everyday with a pinhole. Photography is fun again even with the occasional security encounter. Now lunch has become more of a new perspective than a quick bite. Some exposures actually take as long as lunch to accomplish.

So, take the advice of my grandmother and “chew your food 30 times” and take some long exposures while you’re at it. Enjoy the day!