pinhole cameras

I was showing a friend at work some of my old pinhole camera shots, like this one:



of the Salk Institute,

and he was amazed with the quality that you can get from such a simple camera. Actually, its been such a long time since I played with that stuff that I had also forgotten. My uncle was the one who originally recommended the technique to me, and I quickly became obsessed with it, to the point where I made a special seven shot pinhole camera (plans to this are somewhere on the web) so that I could travel with it. It really is kind of amazing that you can get such beautiful shots from a box with a hole in it. You can even buy precisely drilled laser drilled pinholes now! Theres a lot of geometric distortion (can this be solved by a curved film plane? I don't know) and vignetting, but I think that's part of the charm. Heres another of my favorites:



my dad (an artist) has a maddening but unfortunately true platitude that he likes to roll out whenever I buy a new camera; its something about good artists not needing fancy brushes. Somehow I dont remember the exact wording, but I think the pinhole camera lends credence to this idea. That wont stop me from buying a new lens for my Hassy, or him from buying a new sable brush, though.