Venice Pinhole Landscapes and Portraits

Whilst in Venice I experimented with my Zero Image 2000 pinhole camera. As I have indicated elsewhere in this blog I am trying to get to know how to use pinhole cameras so that I can use them for my long exposure portrait project. I was a little disappointed with the results from the trip. The biggest issue is that one film was completely ruined due to light leakage. I think this happens when I over wound on the film making it loose on the spool. Light gets in from the sides on a loose spool. I need to be very careful with this in the future. I also found the very wide angle square format difficult to use – around 15mm 35mm equivalent. It creates significant distortions and I find that often there is just too much in the frame. I have cropped my images to 4×5 format which I think works better. I am going to try to use the Harman Titan more as this has a 4×5 format and is around 24mm (equiv.) field of view. Here are some images from the trip.

I also used the visit to Venice to work on my skills at street portraiture. My thinking was that one way that documentary photographers illustrate the nature of a place they have visited is through making portraits of the people who live their. I would like to continue to add to this collection of portraits under the working title of ‘Venetians’. I hope to visit Venice again in the first half of 2013. Here is a selection of the portraits: