New Holga 120 Pinhole

[Lowenburg]

Has anyone been working with the new Holga120 PC pinhole camera? I just bought one from B&H, and they have both the square shooter and the wide angle; I went for the square.

I'm going to be using 400 ISO film to start out, and was wondering if anyone has exposure time recommendations. The aperture is F/192. I'm not a technical type photographer so my natural inclination would be to just try random exposure times until I got decent results. But with the price of film and processing being what it is I thought it might be wise to ask the advice of more experienced pinhole photographers.

I'll be using it in both brightly-lit outdoor situations as well as bad weather, rainy days, etc. So if anyone has suggestions I'd be happy to try them out.
Thanks to all, I always receive helpful information on this site!

Bill Lowenburg
P.S. here's a couple of links to my book and blogs

http://crashburnlove-photocommentary.blogspot.com/
(The first picture in the Photocommentary blog was taken with a Holga by the way.)

http://crashburnlove.com

http://crashburnlove.blogspot.com/

 

[winger]

Here's a site that has some general guidelines for exposure if you scroll down just a bit.
http://pinhole.org/?page_id=7

 

[Nitai108]

You can get a table with the exposures equivalent for your f-stop and reciprocity failure for different films with this software http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholedesigner/

For example, for FP5

"Pinhole camera exposure times
f number: 192
Exposure factor for f number 22: 76,2 x
Including reciprocity failure for film: Ilford HP5 Plus 400

Time for f 22 Resulting time
1/1000 1/15
1/500 1/8
1/250 1/4
1/125 1/2
1/60 3 s
1/30 6 s
1/15 13 s
1/8 29 s
1/4 1 m
1/2 4 m
1 s 13 m
2 s 46 m
4 s 3 h
8 s 11 h
15 s 38 h
30 s 153 h
1 m 608 h
2 m 2427 h

Created by PinholeDesigner 2.0, film database v1 (9. 6. 2003)
Copyright © David Balihar, 2001-2003 "

 

[Galah]

P.S. here's a couple of links to my book and blogs

http://crashburnlove-photocommentary.blogspot.com/
(The first picture in the Photocommentary blog was taken with a Holga by the way.)

http://crashburnlove.com

http://crashburnlove.blogspot.com/

Dear Bill,

Fascinating family history and pictures: a treasure in the real sense!

Very kind of you to share

 

[arealitystudios]

I've been using the wide angle Holga pinhole for a few months now. Absolutely love it.

For exposure I've been following a very simple formula that has worked really well. Measure for f/5.6 and multiply the shutter speed by 1,000.

So for example: yesterday on a bright day my meter measure f/5.6 @ 1/400th of a second (I was using ISO 100 film). So one divided by 400 = .0025 and then times 1,000 you get 2.5 seconds.

My cell phone has a calculator on it so doing this quick little formula when out and about is really easy.

It may not be a perfect formula, but I always get in the pallpark when I use this and for pinhole it's good enough.