The Plastic Lens ~ Words » WPPD

World Pinhole Day

Cameron — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 02:05:09 +0000

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day! On the WPPD site for this year only they state:
NOTE: Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is always the last Sunday in April. In 2011, Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is April 24. Since this is also Easter Sunday, for 2011 only, we will accept pinhole photographs taken between April 23 and May 1.
This is just as well for me, as I have been rostered to work across the whole extended holiday weekend.

A Photograph made with the Holga Wide Pinhole Camera

More D.I.Y. Pinhole Fun!

Cameron — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:36:47 +0000

For the 2010 World Pinhole Photography Day, I decided to make a new pinhole camera, similar to the pinhole blender cameras that merge several pinhole images onto one long exposure.
In 2007 at the Daylesford Foto Biennale, I first saw some amazing pinhole images taken by an Australian photographer Steph Tout – Steph Tout Photography
Again in 2009, this time at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, I saw more of her work and was inspired again. Her beautiful images are all captured on a home made pinhole camera, similar to the one I have constructed here. Since 2007 I had plans to make a similar camera to the one Steph Tout had, but it has taken until this year to finally get around to it. Mine is my first try and I am still ironing out some issues. note: the name ‘pinhole blender’ belongs to the excellent commercial products you can buy here: pinholeblender.com

*time-lapse captured on my iPhone
*music by Orb Gettarr – Orb Gettar at OPSOUND

Pinhole Day and a Quick 1st impression of Harinezumi

Cameron — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:20:40 +0000

Pears WPPD 09

This years Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (last Sunday) was less than optimal (for me) for a lot of reasons. The weather was shocking, we had power failures, my computer froze when the power finally came back on and I was suffering from the jet-lag feeling that comes from just finishing night shift and having to adjust your body clock through a 12 hour 180º shift within a day…
Apart from those factors, I had fun and actually managed to grab a few pinhole exposures that I thought were not too bad (not brilliant either however). My two cameras of choice this year were my converted Polaroid EE66 with Polaroid 125i pack film and my Holgamods Pinholga using type 84 packfilm. I started the day with little coffee cups and ended (as I seem to do) in the kitchen with some fruit…

I‘m having a lot (A LOT) of fun with the Digital Harinezumi.

Harinezumi by Harinezumi

This probably has a lot to do with how much it reminds me of using an analogue toy camera. When in still capture mode, you do not get a LCD viewfinder mode, you have to estimate what you are capturing (and anyone who uses toy cameras will know that their viewfinders are less than accurate) You also have the option of turning off the review mode of the camera so that you won’t know what you have got until you download the images to your computer (so I suppose that’s the digital equivalent of waiting to get your film developed).
In movie mode, they’re is no audio as such, there is a bit of white noise. I think it may have been fun if they had the option of the whirr of an old 8mm camera sound as well as the movies generated by the camera remind me of those and the results look very analogue, like some old family home movies from the 1960′s.

Macro Toes by Harinezumi

The colours are kick-ass funky and similar to some sort of weird cross processing type of thing going on…
As you can see from some of my initial test images, the macro function (two choices of focus here macro or normal) works very well. There is nice grain in lower lighting conditions, feeling more reminiscent to me of film grain than ‘digital’ grain. I could go on and probably will, when I do an ‘out of the box’ video review of this little electric hedgehog later on this week, but I remain impressed with what Powershovel & Superheadz have come up with.

Pinhole Day Coming to a World Near You Soon

Cameron — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:37:24 +0000

t’s been a while since i updated the words part of the site, sorry. Things have been a bit busy & weird around here (something not that unusual) but I hope to be back to updating the site with interesting new material, cameras, reviews (including some cool Superheadz cameras) and videos of…stuff (It’s a very useful word, stuff)

In the meantime, this is an older video I made, the last of three from the 2008 Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Considering the 2009 WPPD is in less than 2 months away (Sunday April 26th people) I thought it was about time I posted this one! You can view the first two WPPD vids here and here. I have been considering making a new pinhole camera for this year but am not sure if I’ll have the time, as I have a few things on my plate (good things). Time will tell anyway.

I’m hoping you’ll notice an improved quality to the next videos (tutorials and reviews) that I upload to the site because I have invested in a different camera with higher video resolution, so that may make a difference!

A Pinhole Rose (Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day part 3) from artpunk on Vimeo.

Pinhole Rose in the Paper

Cameron — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:16:06 +0000

esterday (November 12th) my pinhole rose photo was published in the extratech section of the Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne. It’s good to see that in these days of megapixel digital photography the origins of photography and image making (the Camera Obscura) still get some mention (even if it is under the title ‘strange but true‘ *lol*) The article was printed in B & W unfortunately, as the whole layout and accompanying images looked great in colour, hats of to the editor Richard and graphic artist involved – My thanks to Richard Conrad (the technical editor of the paper) for providing the colour pdf of the article for my reference – note that my image and accompanying review of World Pinhole Photography Day is just a small section of the whole article which encompassed a broad spectrum of photography related subjects.