My first 8x10 pinhole image

Jack_Flesher · Jun 12, 2007

I figured why not? I had the 8x10 camera and film, so why not try out some of those ebay laser-drilled, stainless steel pinholes at $29.99 per set. The shot below is of an old Catholic church outsdide Yosemite. It is up on a hill, so I needed to add rise. Obviously I guessed as to how much and got pretty close. Lens was used at appoximately 150mm f256. Exposure was BDE plus 2 for reciprocity on Fuji 160 Pro (which I rate at 125). I know it's tough to over-expose that film, but still I really didn't need +2 and could have gotten away with 1. My shutter was the dark-slide; I pulled it, counted to 4 and re-inserted it.

All-in-all, not a horrible result, but clearly it's no work of art either

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htmlguru4242 · Jun 12, 2007

Wow. That is probably one of the sharpest pinhole images that I've seen! Good exposure and color as well.

Is that a scan of a print or of the film?

Jack_Flesher · Jun 12, 2007

Thanks htmlguru!

It looks sharp here because you are seeing it at about 1:1 -- an advantage to using larger formats with a pinhole The scan itself shows it not to be very sharp at all. It is a scan of the neg done on an Epson 4990 flatbed at 2400 LPI, 48-bit color (over 2 Gig file size!) then reduced in Photoshop to web size sRGB for posting.

eddie gunks · Jun 12, 2007

great one! seems your shutter is dead on!

eddie

DWThomas · Jun 12, 2007

Say what you will, for being taken without a lens, I'd say it's awesome!

DaveT (occasional pinholer)

htmlguru4242 · Jun 12, 2007

That's quite a large file, but I guess that's what you get at that quality and size!

Does your flatbed have a transparency adapter, or is that done just as you would a print?

Jack_Flesher · Jun 12, 2007

htmlguru4242 said:
Does your flatbed have a transparency adapter, or is that done just as you would a print?

The 4990 uses what's called a "full area transparency adapter". With it, you can scan up to 8x10 tranny or neg directly. However, since it rests on the glass scanner surface it is one, below the ideal focus point for the lens and two, the back side of the film is prone to genrating newton rings where it touches the glass. So I lay a sheet of anti-newton glass (actually used a sheet of real lightly textured anti-glare framing glass -- cost me $5) on top of the full area adapter sheet and secure the 8x10 tranny or neg directly to that prior to scanning. This raises the film up closer to the plane of focus and eliminates newton rings. It's no drum scan, but isn't bad at all for as large as I print digitally

Jack_Flesher · Jun 12, 2007

eddie gunks said:
great one! seems your shutter is dead on!

LOLOL! Thanks Eddie! Yes, but truthfully, color neg is very forgiving -- it is *really* tough to over-expose it. You can actually generate some intersting effects by stepping on it by about 6 or 8 stops -- Contrast goes up but you keep some highlight detail and the colors go funky to where the final image kind of looks cross-processed

Robert Hall · Jun 12, 2007

C'mon, you can tell us... you used a lens, didn't you?

Jack_Flesher · Jun 12, 2007

Robert Hall said:
C'mon, you can tell us... you used a lens, didn't you?

Here is an "actual pixel" crop from the base scan -- as you can see, it's really not very sharp :

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Greg_E · Jun 12, 2007

I bet if you give us an image that is even smaller in size, it will look even more like a lens.

I very surprised that you didn't seem to have any motion in the trees, maybe they just aren't resolved well enough to show it.

Dwane · Jun 13, 2007

Can you tell us the name of the seller who sold you the pinholes on eBay? I for one wouldn't mind having a set of those pinholes!

Jack_Flesher · Jun 13, 2007

Tree motion: Frankly, I cannnot remember if there was any wind, but I suspect not much. Regardless, when you look at the scan, the leaves are not really clearly resolved anyway.
~~~

PINHOLES: Here is a link to one of his auctions, but you don't need to bid. You can contact him directly and get them for the same $29: http://cgi.ebay.com/PINHOLE-APERTUR...ryZ30077QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
~~~

Mounting PS: For those interested, all I did to mount the pinhole was stick a piece of black gaffer tape over the rear of a lensboard drilled for a #1 shutter, black side of tape toward the inside, sticky side now showing through the front side of the lensboard hole. I cut an 8mm hole in the tape, centered in the lensboard hole, and then simply stuck the pinhole sheet to the front of the board over the tape, pinhole reasonably centered in the board's hole. The corners of the pinhole sheets needed to be clipped slightly to fit completely inside the #1 hole and I just used scissors to clip about 5mm off each corner. The gaffer tape is sticky enough to hold the pinhole, but not so sticky to prevent easy removal and swapping of pinhole sheets. The black tape with the small hole at the rear limits internal refections from the stainless steel
~~~

Finally, I used this free program to make my aperture/focal length calculations -- I entered my own user constant of 1.6, generating slightly smaller suggested apertures than diffraction or Ralleigh: http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholedesigner/

Cheers,

Robert Hall · Jun 14, 2007

Just pullin your leg, Jack. It's just that most of us have gone through the pin-hole stage (some have never left!) and probably dont do a lot of it because we just can't deal with the lack of clarity.

Again, nice job.

Jack_Flesher · Jun 14, 2007

Hi Robert: No worries, I knew your meaning

I should clarify that I was just having some fun with the pinhole and I don't really see it as a "serious" long-term endeavor on my part either. However I was slightly surprised that my "theory" of larger formats generating more pleasing results was more or less proven true! I also suspect there may be others who want to take pinhole more seriously, and just wanted to share my approach to set-up on the chance they find it helpful.

Regardless, serious or not, carrying an extra lensboard and all 12 pinholes takes up zero room and adds only a few ounces of weight to the pack!

Cheers,

Jack

htmlguru4242 · Jun 15, 2007

$29 for all of those pinholes is really not bad at all. If memory servers, I've seen single laser-drilled pinholes for close to that much. I wonder how pinhole would work out for infrared and UV images?

PhotoBob · Jun 16, 2007

Nice image

Say that is a pretty nice pinhole image - thanks for sharing

Jim Jones · Jun 16, 2007

htmlguru4242 said:
$29 for all of those pinholes is really not bad at all. If memory servers, I've seen single laser-drilled pinholes for close to that much. I wonder how pinhole would work out for infrared and UV images?

They work well for IR and UV. A slight change in pinhole diameter optimizes sharpness for different wavelengths. http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholedesigner/ lets one adjust for this.

Jack_Flesher · Jun 17, 2007

Thanks for the comment Bob!

Jim, that is the same software I provided a link to above and it does indeed allow you to input the wavelength of light you are targeting to optimise. While I realize there is a theoretical optimum aperture I'm not convinced it is that critical for pinhole, at least on large format. If I am wrong in that assumption, please correct me! For 4x5 and 8x10, I simply go a little smaller than optimal, shooting for f256. (Makes it easy to do the exposure math!) Depending on what distance I place the pinhole, I figure as long as I'm between f180 and f360, it's probably good enough. HOWEVER, I suspect if one is using these on smaller formats, getting as close to optimal as possible is a good idea.

Cheers,

Jack

Jim Jones · Jun 17, 2007

Years ago I did some testing of on-axis and off-axis pinhole sharpness. There is a small, but noticable, peak in sharpness at the optimum aperture. This peak in on-axis sharpness occurs with a user constant of about 1.5 in
Pinhole Designer. With this constant, a pinhole can resolve line pairs somewhat smaller than the pinhole diameter. A slightly larger pinhole favors off-axis sharpness with a reduction of on-axis sharpness. The old data on pinhole sharpness isn't handy at the moment, but I believe a pinhole diameter that varies from optimum by 10% causes a noticable loss of sharpness on a resolution chart. It would be less noticable in practical pinhole photography. There is a little more information on this in Matt Young's interesting paper at Dead Link Removed.

Since the optimum pinhole diameter depends on light wave length, pinholes have slight chromatic aberration. The off-axis resolution between tangential and radial test pattern images are not equal. Thus, the pinhole has astigmatism. Testing for such characteristics is interesting, but the end of most photography should be photos, not tests. Some pinhole images are strong despite less than optimum sharpness.

walter23 · Dec 7, 2007

This is kind of old but Jack would you mind reposting that image? I'm curious to see it now.

Horst · Dec 13, 2007

eddie gunks said:
great one! seems your shutter is dead on!

eddie

Thanks for the tipps! Interesting stuff!

Horst

My first 8x10 pinhole image

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