More Pinhole Camera!

I continue to experiment with the pinhole camera that I built last weekend, although some of it turned out to be a bust. I tried some nighttime pictures with a four minute exposure, but all I got was blurry smudges. Either the pinhole is not good at full dark photos, something that the book of other people's photographs that came with it suggests is not true, or I need to leave the shutter open for much, much longer.

For the rest of the photos, I took the pinhole camera to familiar places, as I have the idea that I will learn how to manage it better if I practice on things that I already know and am used to photographing. Since I was already on campus for Open House, I figured I might as well start there.



I've mentioned before that I think that sculpture is pretty ugly, but it's softened and almost non-offensive here.



McClung Tower came out in surprisingly sharp focus, but "Europa and the Bull" in front of it is pretty indistinct:



(Side note: My class seemed rather surprised when I told them the myth behind that statue early in the semester, and that Europa was riding the bull and, later, riding the bull in a whole other sense. Yay for learning!)

I stuck the camera on a random tree branch, too, and got this shot, which I think is really pretty:



Completely unexpected, but that's part of the fun, I guess.

Before I left campus, I drove up the hill to Ayres Hall, which is recognizable even in this format:



Here's a photo I took another time with my regular camera, just for comparison:



It looks almost like an older photo, the kind you'd find in your parents's photo albums, and I was definitely right last week about things being clearer if I open the shutter for just a second or two longer.

I walked around campus a little more, taking some ugly photos with bad exposures that I didn't like and don't want to share, and then headed downtown to World's Fair Park. I was supposed to take pictures there last week, but ran out of film just as I got there, so this week I made up for it by studying the bridge:







and the Sunsphere:



And I accidentally took a picture of myself:



I guess I need to learn to lean a little further over, to get out of the frame, but there's always time for that next time.