Rolls 10 & 11: GoSlo, the Extreme Action Pinhole Camera

The GoSlo suction-mounted to the rear window in my Prius. The smoked glass is roughly equivalent to an ND4 filter. Note that it is upside-down to position the pinhole between the defrost wires.

The GoSlo mounted on the hood of my Prius. This is how I took the driving selfie.

My favorite pinhole photography joke is still a work in progress, but it has something to do with the World Series and a photo of an empty baseball diamond.

The idea of “sports pinhole photography” is ridiculous, but when I built a servo-actuated shutter for my pinhole cameras, the next step had to be putting the camera in absurd or surprising contexts.

When the shrinking size and cost of High Def video cameras intersected with adhesive and other clever mounting technologies, the result was the GoPro. Similarly, with a remotely-controlled shutter, a pinhole camera can be mounted distant to the photographer for reasons of safety, security, composition, or stealth. For these photos, the pinhole camera was mounted in the rear window of my Prius.  An arduino-compatible Trinket by Adafruit provides a pseudo-PWM control signal for the servo and the shutter is manually controlled from the front seat by wire.  Interfacing a microcontroller to the shutter servo could allow for a number of other applications, including a pre-set countdown timer, timed delay, motion activation, even auto-exposure.  Until which time I motorize the film winding, each frame must by advanced by hand.  The official Hackaday project page (under construction) with technical details can be found HERE

Making pinhole photographs of the vehicles behind you poses some logistical problems. With the goal of surreptitious driver portraits, SUVs, trucks, and minivans are potentially too tall.  The camera is a wide angle (approx. 90 degrees) design for framing ease, but the driver winds up being rather small in the frame.  Also, the windshield is both angled and reflective in most cases, and the driver is thus obscured.  The best possible subjects are aggressive drivers that stop very close to my rear bumper. Most of these were shot stopped at lights, but shooting slow film in the canyons of Seattle necessitated long exposures, which, in some cases exceeded the duration of the traffic light.  In a few cases, I pretended to not notice that the light had changed in order to finish the exposure.  The switch to a B&W ISO 400 film eliminated that problem and when the shutter speed was very fast (by pinhole standards), the smooth motion of the servo prevented undesirable camera movement as the shutter opened and closed.

Most of the resulting photos aren’t very interesting to me, but they are sufficiently sharp that tiny details of vehicle trim and licensing are easy to discern. The only edits to the scans were blurring of license plates.

For better portraits, I think I will mount the camera in the passenger window next time. This will also have the added bonus that I won’t need to exit the car and lift the hatchback to wind the film.

Film: Fuji Velvia 50 – 120 film

Camera: terraPin 6X9 3D printed pinhole camera with RoboShutta

Honda on Mercer

The canyons of Seattle

Yellow cab in my bidniz

Prius at Dexter and Nickerson

Lexus and Monorail

Film: Kodak TMax400 – 120 film

Camera: terraPin 6X9 3D printed pinhole camera with RoboShutta

GoSlo Extreme Action Pinhole Selfie

Ballard

Cypresses

Branches

Spooky

This roll was processed and scanned by Moon Photo in Seattle; with the exception of blurred license plates, all images are as scanned without alteration.  More photos from this and my other 52Rolls can be found HERE.