Pinhole Music Video

[jason joseffer]

Hi All,

 

Thought that the lens forum would be an interesting place to share a music video I recently shot on a custom machined pinhole lens-

 

 

I machined the lens to have variable focal lengths (25mm, 50mm and 85mm) with an integrated rotating aperture plate. We shot in wide screen with an 18fps time base.

 

Thanks for checking it out.

 

pinthumb.pdf

[Nicholas Kovats]

Great stuff! Bravo!

[Gregg MacPherson]

That was really nice, and the music/musician is worthy of it.

 

At art school in the early 80s we made pin hole lenses by a small pin prick in tinfoil (35mm cartridge body I think). Sharper pictures than in this video. So I was a bit let down when I saw and read how you had done it, machined pinholes and that was a digital camera I think. What's wrong with going the tinfoil and real film way....?

[jason joseffer]

Hi Gregg,

 

Thanks for watching the video. I did the tests with tin foil, but I wanted a lens with variable focal lengths. If I simply put tin foil over the mount I'd be locked into approximately 50mm. My lens allowed me to have focal length options and quickly change them out. You probably experienced sharper images with stills by using smaller aperture sizes. Even with the camera cranked up to 6400ISO, I couldn't use my smallest aperture options. Perhaps with a camera that has 3 or 4 more stops of sensitivity you'd get those crisper pictures.

[Gregg MacPherson]

Hey Jason,

Those times are just a memory now. Maybe the images weren't sharper...The film was just whatever was available for stills then, but we had as much exposure time as we wanted, so the sharpness comparison is probably quite unfair...so don't think too much on my comment...

 

I think what really underlys my feeling is that one could do a project like the On The Road clip with the relatively old film technolgy, and use tinfoil pinprick lenses, accepting the errors, uncertainties...What then comes is real or factual, rather than being an affected look or reference.

 

Without propping myelf up with Google, I'm guessing that the position of the pinhole relative to the film plane will give the focal length, so I don't see any problem with the old "garage" aproach. One could make the pinhole lenses with cardboard and tinfoil, just as we did back then...