When I'm shooting digital pinhole (or digital zone plate, which is my
favorite at the moment) I find that I move at about the same speed I do
with my ZeroImage 4x5 or the pinhole blender or any other film based
camera. For some reason pinholing makes me walk, move, and think in
slow motion, and it didn't change with digital.
I do bring back more images, but they are not machine gun shooting (it'd
be a very slow machine gun... exposure times are still often in
minutes). I can finally do what I wished for with other pinhole cameras
- refine the framing, nudge the exposure in one direction or the other,
and not have to depend on the color lab to process my images correctly.
(Or not lose them, which has happened twice in the last year with
sheet film.) I have never thought that "accidents" of too much
foreground, a slightly truncated head, unexpected reciprocity effects,
etc, were necessary for pinhole work to be artistically interesting.
The ability to check framing and readily see the effect of bracketing
exposures has opened up some new avenues for me using pinhole and zone
plate. I've shot two commercial gigs with digital zone plate now - shot
them conventionally but then tried a few zone plate shots, and the
client loved the feel of the images and used them.
I can assure you that the processing of a few hundred digital images is
excruciating. My digital pinhole days typically result in 30 or 40
frames across a day for 8-10 images. With film, I'd shoot 15-20 frames
trying for the same number of images, and end up losing one or two or
more of the images to being near-misses on exposure, framing, or the
shape of the motion I was trying to capture.
I suppose I prefer the art of refining my vision more than letting the
chance elements of not having a viewfinder modify my vision for me.
Chance still plays a pretty significant role, since I can't really see
through the viewfinder, but now I can interact with and play with chance.
Ed
Wolfgang Thoma wrote:
> Guy Glorieux wrote:
>> Hey Taco,
>>
>> Glad you got overruled on digital pinhole... -:)
>> My submission was digital pinhole...
>> http://www.pinholeday.org/gallery/2008/index.php?id=327
>>
>> I agree that *"digital pinhole" is a conceptual aberration*.
>> and so is digital photography.
>>
>> But they both exist and they offer a wide spectrum of possibilities
>>
>> The debate is open!
>>
>>
> That's exactly the point, Guy:
> "(digital) offers a wide spectrum of possibilities"
> Where a paper negative pinholer has ONE shot and a film pinholer with
> 120 film 8 - 12, a digital pinholer can shoot 250 tol 1000 (depending on
> his memory card) in the "LOMO STYLE" (just point from the hip and shoot)
> without any thinking or reflections WHAT, WHY, HOW etc and then select
> just the one of the two thousand that was the best (or not so bad as the
> others). Just compare that with a conventional slide film lens
> photographer who has to THINK in forehand about the W, W & H for not
> spoiling precious film. Can you imagine me running araund on WPPD with
> 2000 one shot cardboard boxes?
> Exactly you with your Montreal hotel room pinhole (which I admire)
> disappoint me with your new mind/opinion
> And now the debate can really start ;-)
> taco
> _______________________________________________
> Post to the list as PLAIN TEXT only - no HTML
> pinhole-discussion mailing list
> pinhole-discussion@spitbite.org
> FAQ at http://spitbite.org/pinhole-discussion/list.html
_______________________________________________
Post to the list as PLAIN TEXT only - no HTML
pinhole-discussion mailing list
pinhole-discussion@spitbite.org
FAQ at http://spitbite.org/pinhole-discussion/list.html
Received on Tue Jun 3 15:20:55 2008
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue 02 Dec 2008 - 02:00:02 PST