WPPD 2015

Well, Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 2015 was April 26^th and all the pinhole photos taken that day all around the world are slowly gathering together on the WPPD website (www.pinholdday.org) once again. This is always an exciting time of year for me. I come home each evening and review the pinhole photos posted that day.

The first day of course is almost all digital photos taken with a variety of digital cameras modified to take pinhole photographs. The second and third day you start seeing more and more photos as the momentum builds.  Many of these are shot on film and processed at home by the photographer.

As the first week comes to an end the film photos processed by local labs start to show up with increasing regularity and the digital photos start tapering off. The trend will continue until the end of the month, May 31, when the submittal period officially ends with the closing of the exhibition.

This year I shot with my Holga WPC on Kodak Ektar 100 color film. Although I generally prefer 400 (ISO) film and have most often used Portra 400 for WPPD, I really like the color palette of this film and as you can see from the photograph above I was rewarded with rich bright colors.

The Holga WPC is an interesting pinhole camera looking very much like a stretched Holga. It offers two formats; 6x9 and 6x12. The latter is considered ultra-wide or panoramic which costs extra to process and scan (at the Darkroom). This time I chose the 6x9 format and decided (again) that I really like it. I have an old Kodak Vigilant 620 folder that shoots 6x9 format and although I don’t shoot it much I recall now how much I liked the format whenever I have used it.  

I also used a light meter App on my Android phone this year called “Light Meter Tools” and it seemed to work pretty well. This will be the subject of a later post.

The photo above is the one I submitted to the WPPD website and I am pretty pleased with the results.  It shows my wife Mary & son Noah, hanging out on a bench at the Baton Rouge Botanical Gardens with his guitar. We visited there for WPPD and to do a photo shoot for Krista, my pregnant daughter-in-law. I really love all the bright colored flowers and the rich greenery. It makes a beautiful background for whatever you’re shooting. I had asked everyone to wear bright colors since I planned to include people in my pinhole photos for a change. As you can see my son Noah, ever the contrarian, showed up in black & white attire!

I rarely shoot people with pinhole because the exposures are usually rather long and people seem to have problems being still these days. The results are quite special when you can make it work however.

This 4 second exposure was taken with the camera on a tripod and the shutter held open with a rubber band. The lens cover was simply removed and replaced 4 seconds later. I have a cable release but sometimes prefer to use the old fashioned simplicity of a lens cap. Processing and scanning as noted earlier were done by The Darkroom.

My photo submission is #1760. Check it and a couple thousand others out (last year they had over 3500 photo submissions) on the WPPD web site.