Pinhole photography: simple idea, complex art

By Cherry Sokoloski
North Forty News

Like many avid photographers and outdoorsmen, Mark James takes his camera along with him when he goes backpacking. He looks for just the right light and just the right subject. However, that's where the similarity with most photographers ends.

The equipment that James takes with him can be summed up as follows: a cardboard box with a tiny hole in one side, electrical tape, lots of rubber bands and several old-fashioned film holders for 4x5 negatives.

James is a pinhole photographer. The pinhole concept, he explained, was actually invented by fine art painters and predates photography. Even youngsters can make pinhole cameras, so James' own children have made plenty of them. They enjoy shooting wacky subjects and developing the film in the family's basement darkroom.

James and other fine art photographers have taken the simple craft to a very complex level, however. He's currently working on a book - filled with his own photographs - that expresses the wilderness as seen through a pinhole camera. He has also won awards in the Maine Photographic Workshop and was selected as the artist in residence at Rocky Mountain National Park one summer to further his work in pinhole imagery.

James, his wife, Patricia, and their family live in the Waverly area. He started as a photojournalist, working at the Triangle Review, and he's had a long career in commercial and industrial photography. However, he's always done his own fine art photography on the side. James' interest in pinhole photography goes back to the 1980s, when he and several other black-and-white photographers opened the Illustrated Light Gallery (not related to a current gallery of the same name) in Fort Collins. The gallery attracted outstanding photographers, making it a time of high energy and great creativity.

One of the members of that group was Mike Butts of Loveland, whose specialty was pinhole imagery. He loaned James one of his pinhole cameras about nine years ago, and something clicked. Not literally, of course, because exposing the film in a pinhole camera does not involve a conventional shutter. One simply removes a small piece of electrical tape from the tiny hole in the front of the camera, with the tape serving as both shutter and lens cap.

Since that trial run, James has been intrigued with the effects that are possible with pinhole photography. The technique requires a long exposure time, so his pinhole prints have "a dreamy, ethereal look," with no sharp lines. "It's about as far away from reality as possible with film," James said, "like looking into a wilderness where no one's ever been before." He likes that aspect of pinhole photography, plus the fact that everything in the image is in focus, from near to far.

Cardboard creation

When making his cameras, James covers the corners of a cardboard box with electrical tape, to prevent light from leaking in. The "lens" is a tiny hole, made with a sewing needle in a thin piece of brass shim material. James uses a film holder from a standard 4x5 camera, fits it onto the back of the box and holds it tight with rubber bands. Each film holder is good for two shots, with one negative on the front and one on the back.

The film is "blue sensitive," which was the only kind of film available before the 20th century but now is difficult to find. With this film, blue subjects such as sky or water are very bright in the picture, while other objects such as green trees go almost black. The combination of film and small aperture makes long exposures necessary. While James has used exposures anywhere from four seconds to 40 minutes long, the average time is two to five minutes. His equipment for achieving the correct exposure time includes a light meter and a stopwatch. Novices, suggested James, will have an easier time using panchromatic film, which is sensitive to all wavelengths of light.

Printing is key

Once the film is developed, the hard work of pinhole photography begins. "The real craftsmanship in pinhole is in the printing," James said; it can take three hours to print just one negative. Besides the standard developer and fixer, he uses two different toners to get just the chocolate-brown color he wants. He also uses a wide variety of light manipulations to craft a print. "The final print looks way different from the negative," James said.

James has a day job at Fine Print in Fort Collins, so he does his pinhole work at night. He'll frequently pull all-nighters in the darkroom, and the process is so painstaking that a moonlight shift generally yields just 16 prints.

In this digital age, pinhole photography is indeed an anomaly. It takes time, there are no instant results and the artist doesn't know until the darkroom work is done whether the photo is a good one. But then, most good things are worth waiting for, and James' work is definitely worth the wait.