I always wanted to try pinhole photography, so when Thingyfy offered their new Pinhole Pro X 40-60 mm zoom pinhole “lens”, I bought one. It arrived the day before I left for Atlanta and I carried on a trip to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.
Pinhole Pro X
The Pinhole Pro X has fixed pinhole aperture set in a helicoid mount that allows the distance between the sensor and the pinhole to be adjusted from 40 mm to 60 mm. The result is that the angle of view gets narrower as you move the pinhole away from the sensor. Thingyfy says this is the world’s first zoom pinhole lens. Cool, eh?
The Pinhole Pro X has a 0.25 mm pinhole diameter. I’ll explore what this means for sharpness in another post. If you look at the picture of the Pinhole Pro X, you see a dark spot down in the center of the “lens”. That’s not the pinhole. The pinhole is actually a tiny fraction of that central indentation.
So, how much light comes through that pinhole? At 40 mm, the f number is 40/0.25 = 160, at 50 mm it is 200, and at 60 mm, it is 240. So not much light gets through.
For example, let’s say you are out on a bright day using film that is 100 ISO, then the sunny 16 rule suggests you can shoot with 1/100 of a second and f16. At 50 mm you will have to increase the exposure by a factor of 156. This means from 1/100 sec, to about 1.6 sec to get the same exposure. As the light gets dimmer, the exposures get longer.
Going to Atlanta
I decided not to take a tripod with me to Atlanta. Instead, I packed a monopod with a ball head. The monopod was much lighter and I wanted to try to cover some ground in the Botanical Gardens so I didn’t want to be fiddling with a tripod.
It was completely overcast in the Botanical Gardens and it was threatening rain. When I broke out the pinhole, I set the camera to ISO 12,800 and 1/30 sec. I thought 1/30 sec on a monopod wouldn’t introduce too much blur. It worked. I could frame the pictures with the mirror up and the screen activated. Then just blast away. I took most of the pinhole pictures with 1/15 sec or 1/30 sec and ISOs of 10,000 or 12,800.
Daffodils
See the shot at the top of the post. With the pinhole, you don’t adjust the f stop and you don’t focus. Since there is no focusing, you can just shove the camera right up to your subject and blaze away. That’s what I did with the daffodils. Pinholes aren’t tremendously sharp. Their charm is that they give a “glow”, a “ghostly” aspect or an “air of mystery” to your photographs. These daffodils look plenty mysterious. I shot this at 1/30 sec and ISO 12,800. I look forward to doing some work on a tripod with this lens.
Earth Goddess
This is the Earth Goddess in the Cascade Gardens. She is twenty-five feet high. Here, in January, she is “naked”. In the spring, they dress her up with 18,000 flowers. I’ve seen her twice, both times in January. I’d like to go in the spring to see her fully decked out. In this shot, I wanted to get some flowers in the foreground and see how the foreground/background focus worked out. The answer: uniformly “dreamy” throughout. I shot her at 1/15 sec and ISO 12,800.
Moon Gate
This is the Moon Gate at the Japanese Garden in the Botanical Gardens. It looks otherworldly. I shot this with the monopod laying across my knee (it wouldn’t go as low as I wanted). The Pinhole Pro X was set to 40 mm, as wide as it would go. I shot this at 1/13 sec and ISO 12,800.
Japanese Garden Tree
Here’s a tree in the Japanese Garden. It looks like it came from a dream.
Saffron Tower
This is Saffron Tower by the glass artist, Dale Chihully. The thirty-foot-tall Tower stands at the end of and is reflected in the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation Water Mirror. All of the spindly yellow branches are neon lights, 3660 watts of them. I’ve visited twice, but I have not seen it lit up.
There are three Chihully glass works at the Botanical Gardens. The other two are the Parterre Fountain Installation at the Levy Parterre Fountain and the Nepenthes Chandelier in the Hardin Visitor Center. I photographed these with regular lenses and they might appear in later posts. Learn more about Dale Chihully and his art here. I shot this at 1/15 sec and ISO 10,000.
That’s for the first day of shooting with the Pinhole Pro X. I hope to get out with it and a tripod in the near future.
These shots were all taken with a Canon 6DII wearing the Thingyfy Pinhole Pro X. They were processed with Darktable, a free program available for Windoze, Mac, and Linux.
Never heard of a pinhole lens. Live and learn.