i’ve been occupied with pinhole photography lately. i’ve always wanted to do some experimenting with pinhole photography, but never managed to due to several reasons… after doing some reading up, i made some plans and calculations to create my first pinhole camera. medium format film seemed like a perfect film format to use, so i thought it would be a good idea to involve one of my Mamiya RB67 film backs in this little ‘project’. doing so, decent film handling would be ensured.

i asked my dad to make me a wooden front cover to put in front of the film back. whenever i ask him to make me something, i give him some measurements and ideas and he always manages to come up with something that looks way better than i could even imagine :D gotta love it!

so the pinhole camera(i named her ‘Zulma’, that’s a pretty descent camera name if you ask me ;-p) is mainly a Mamiya RB67 film back and a wooden front cover held together by a bunch of rubber bands. the camera has a focal length of 48mm(equivalent to 24mm in 35mm format) and an aperture of f/300(will be changed to f/160 soon though).

below are some pictures of my first test roll. the main purpose was to check whether the pinhole covered the entire negative; turns out it did, so mission accomplished!

i’m currently using a 0.16mm pinhole(gives an aperture of f/300), because that’s what i had available. the optimal pinhole size should be 0.292mm for my setup, so i’ll be using a 0.3mm pinhole(gives an aperture of f/160) soon. because the pinhole size(and the aperture) is currently way too small, diffraction effects increase a lot and cause much blur. hence the not-that-sharp-photos below. i somehow like the blurriness though…

all pictures were exposed for 90 seconds. film used: Ilford Delta 100(developed in Rodinal 1:50).

the photos are far from perfect. there are still some flaws, but the wooden front cover is just a test version. hopefully the issues can be addressed in the next ‘version’ of the wooden front cover…

-bert