So after recently jumping into the world of pinhole photography I've come to the realization that it's very difficult to really figure out your composition. You can ballpark things but composing with a pinhole and composing with an SLR are two very different experiences. I had heard on a youtube video about Ilford's Harman titan pinhole that virtual viewfinders are out there for various phones. After checking for myself, there doesn't seem to be too many apps out there, and some are spectacularly expensive. I got in touch with the developer of one such app named "Focal Viewfinder" and discussed if they could make a preset for my titan 4x5. They were remarkably receptive to the idea and within a few days got back to me saying they were adding it as a pre-set but ran into a snag with one of the cones for the titan. Turns out an iPhone's camera has an angle of view of about 60 degrees, where the 72mm cone on the titan is around 97 degrees. The issue here is the iPhone cannot display a full view of what the titan will capture making the app useless for wide angle pinholes. Undaunted the developer ordered off of amazon a 0.4x clip on adapter for the iPhone lens which bumps the iPhones camera up to a little over 100 degrees (the lens adapter is quite reasonably priced, about $20ish off of amazon). They're testing how well it works in beta right now. If they get everything to work (and it sounds like they will), Focal Viewfinder might be a decent app to help with composing wide angle pinholes. This developer (emphasis films and digital) seems quite keen to work with the pinhole community from my experience so you may want to check out the app and if you don't see your camera represented they may be willing to work with you to make your photography easier! If everything works out I'll buy the app and adapter and report back here to let people know how it works. I'm fairly excited to see if they can make this work as it will give me one more level of control over my pinhole photography!
