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The Showcase of Beautiful Pinhole Photography

Quick Summary

Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is the person behind the camera that makes it truly remarkable. It’s his imagination, passion, talent and knowledge of the medium. You don’t need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent and a way of looking at things differently along with ability to envision the final result in your mind is more than enough for a great shot. A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole on one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. You can easily construct this camera yourself using things lying around like match boxes or any kind of boxes, paper, duct tape etc. The small amount of light passing through this pin sized hole produces image on a photographic film or a image sensor.

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Camera is a remarkable piece of innovation. However, it is the person behind the camera that makes it truly remarkable. It’s his imagination, passion, talent and knowledge of the medium. You don’t need a high-end costly equipment to get beautiful results. Just your talent and a way of looking at things differently along with ability to envision the final result in your mind is more than enough for a great shot.

What is a pinhole camera?

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole on one side.

Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. You can easily construct this camera yourself using things lying around like match boxes or any kind of boxes, paper, duct tape etc. The small amount of light passing through this pin sized hole produces image on a photographic film or a image sensor.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

If you don’t want to get your hands dirty on creating a pinhole camera by yourself, you can use your DSLR with some modifications (replacing camera lenses with a pinhole cover). Although it takes practice and lot of trial and error method to get a perfect picture, you don’t need to worry about the focus and distortions, as there are no lenses involved. You might as well end up with some lovely motion blurred photographs.

In this post we present beautiful and inspiring photographs created using a pinhole camera. Please notice how photographers use the camera creatively to produce quite remarkable images. At the bottom of this post you will find links to some photographers and references to related resources that will help you get you started. Also, we listed related Flickr pools that contain thousands of further examples of what can be achieved with this technique. Get inspired, folks!

Beautiful Inspiring Pinhole Photography

Tarquin Coates

pinhole photography

Tetsuya

The calmness of blue by Andrew Watson

Daniel Tückmantel

Invader by TEIKO

Mackeson

Danielle Hughson

Tea Room

pinhole photography

A. Wallis

An Oceanic Ghost Forest by Danielle Hughson

Zeb Andrews

Mackeson

Danielle Hughson

Scott VanderStouw

Tea Room

Scott Speck

Scott Speck

Mackeson

Bruno Malegue

gonebiking

The Iron Cycloid by Scott Speck

Matteo Bagnoli

The Sleeping Zebra by Scott Speck

Sarah Knopf

Follow The Tunes by Tim Franco

Bill Bresler

nhung dang

Darren C.

Scott Speck

Tea Room

Celeste Brignac

A. Wallis

Darren C.

Zeb Andrews

Kakki

Kent Mercurio

Mackeson

Erik

Zeb Andrews

Michael C. Pastur

mist-y

Zeb Andrews

Tea Room

Always de Sun

Remarkable Photographers

And here is a brief overview of some remarkable pinhole photographers from Flickr. They have added a new dimension to photography: their photo streams are full of beautiful photographs.

Zeb Andrews

Tea Room

Scott Speck

Further Resources