Low-High Tech Photography

As a practice for the upcoming Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day I set out in the near dark, cold and rainy evening to try and get an image from a small hole, poked with a safety pin, in a piece of metal from a tealight taped to a plastic camera body cap....that was the low tech bit. The high tech bit was what it was connected to...a Nikon D7000 on a tripod connected to a set of radio triggers and using an iPhone to time the multi-minute exposure times you need when trying to get an image through a hole you can barely see with the naked eye. Just to make it a bit more entertaining you can't see a damn thing through the viewfinder so you just have to point it in the general direction and hope....

It might have been a bit easier in the daytime when the light was better but the semi-darkness meant that, at least, I didn't have to contend with passers by spotting me and advising me that '....your camera lens seems to be missing mate'. My high tech 'back end' to a pinhole camera isn't really quite in the spirit of pinhole photography as, by rights, I should have made it out of a cardboard box and used some proper film rather than a digital sensor....still it was (sort of) fun, if nothing else it proved to me a couple of things:

1. This is why we spend so much money on a camera lens....a hole poked in a bit of metal can't really compete in terms of sharpness, resolution, colour rendition, contrast etc etc

2. Just how scarily dirty your sensor looks when you shoot at the (rough) equivalent of f200!!!