pinholes

TRAVEL HAS BECOME PRECIOUS IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, so every chance to go somewhere has become a bigger opportunity, for new experiences and (of course) photos. I’d been to Prince Edward Island before – almost a decade ago, in fact – but this trip let me see a bit more of the province, and specifically its capital, Charlottetown.

First and foremost, it was a chance to spend time with family. This gave me a home base just outside Montague, a harbour town around 50 kilometers from Charlottetown, but thanks to my family I was able to take day trips all over the eastern shore of the island, so that became the focus of the post I put up on my travel photography blog this week.

*Beach, St. Andrews Point, PEI, Sept. 2023*

As ever, there are the photos I take for the travel photo site – the snapshots, postcard pics and documentation that illustrate every travel story. But I’ve always been candid that one of the main reasons I like to travel is to take the kinds of pictures I’ve had in my head since I picked up my first Instamatic camera as a kid. I can, of course, take these pictures anywhere I want; smartphones with increasingly good cameras have expanded the opportunities immensely over the last decade.

Still, travel is energizing, and a change of venue does wonders for inspiration – and motivation. The photos here aren’t the sorts of things I see in my normal city life, and some of them are unique to PEI and the life and geography of the island. There isn’t, for instance, an abundance of lighthouses where I live, so those are visual opportunities that are impossible to ignore, even as a novelty.

I brought a full range of lenses along on this trip (and even came home with a new one, but more about that later). My 12mm Samyang remains essential and my 7Artisans fisheye is still a useful luxury, but since I acquired my 28mm Retina-Curtagon last year, I’ve fallen for the subtle qualities of that lens. I brought two pinholes – the Thingify Pro S for wider shots and the Pro X zoom optic – to cover every possible focal length, and my Pentacon 50/1.8, which is my best lens for close-up work. I have, gradually, turned back into the kind of photographer who carries a bag of lenses everywhere.

But it’s time to admit that my Samsung Android phone has become as crucial as my Fuji mirrorless when shooting travel. Its camera allows me to shoot panoramic photos that I’d need to stitch together in Photoshop with the Fuji, and sometimes it’s just easier to pull the Samsung out of my pocket and take a quick photo when I see it. At least a couple of those snapshots ended up in my travel blog post – and of course the cellphone is crucial to posting pics to social media while I travel. (Because let’s be honest – phones are taking far more travel photos than cameras these days.) And finally there’s my beloved Fuji X30, my favorite camera to use, and the one that took all of the photos on the post you’re reading now.

*Lower Montague Cemetery, PEI, Sept. 2023*

*Saint Alexis RC Church, Rollo Bay, PEI, Sept. 2023*

Spending time with my sister and her husband on St. Andrews Point gave me an opportunity to explore one small, local spot that I might have only glimpsed if I were on a road trip through the province, or traveling in a van full of other travel journalists. I wouldn’t, for instance, have had a chance to hike to not one but two cemeteries on my trip (and I do love a cemetery), or discover Saint Alexis Church near Rollo Bay, closed eight years ago, while driving around on errands with my brother-in-law. It was nice to spend time with them, and I have to thank Mary and Lou for their hospitality and chauffeur services.

*At work, St. Andrews Point, PEI, Sept. 2023*

I haven’t shot as many pinholes as I would have liked in the last year, so this trip gave me an opportunity to make up for the deficit. It was nice to have the chance to slip into the careful pinhole process – remarkably like shooting with a view camera (but without loading film holders or calculating exposure). Going to a new place is always the best time to take pinholes; the strange, dreamlike quality of the images evoke a bit of the disorientation you always feel when traveling.

*Near Governors House, Charlottetown, PEI, Sept. 2023*

*Greenwich Dunes National Park, PEI, Sept. 2023*

*Basin Head Provincial Park, PEI, Sept. 2023*

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A collection of cel…

By Rick McGinnis

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*Etobicoke from Humber Bay Park, Oct. 2022*

PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY WAS A GIFT OF THE PANDEMIC. I probably never would have focused on pinhole work as intently as I have if I wasn’t looking for something – anything – to do with my time and energy while the world shut down and work went away. Which is my cue to say that, now that this phase of history is over, it’s time to look back and assess.

And normally that’s what I’d do; I began using the winter doldrums to take stock of my progress nearly thirty years ago, when the thrill of the steep learning curve began to flatten out. Which is precisely why that’s not what I feel like doing with pinhole work at the moment – the learning curve is still looming in front of me whenever I pull a pinhole optic from my camera bag, and I feel like I’m still a lot of photos away from reaching a point where the work can pleasingly fill a wall.

Pinhole work does for me what shooting with a view camera might do for another photographer. When I know I have a potential pinhole in front of me and unclip my tripod from my backpack, the gears begin to shift and I slow down to get ready for the moment when I press the shutter release. Because like shooting with a 4×5 bellows camera and loaded film backs, there’s an awful lot of fine tuning going on – the ratio of squinting to clicking is seriously out of balance, and like shooting with a view camera, there’s that moment where you think “Is that it?” You never feel like you’ve taken enough frames given the effort leading up to that shutter click.

Three years into the pinhole experiment, I’ve collected an interesting little palette of optics. Which is amusing since what I have is essentially a collection of tiny holes. Only I can see the need for three (actually five) different holes that transmit light into my camera. There’s the Pinhole Pro X I bought on Kickstarter before lockdowns – a kind of Swiss army knife of pinhole optics that’s actually a zoom pinhole.

Then there’s the Lensbaby Obscura, which has three different kinds of non-lens optics (pinhole, sieve and zone plate), and the original Pinhole Pro S I bought when I needed the widest angle of view I could get. They cover pretty much every possible aspect of pinhole-to-digital photography I can imagine right now, though I’m deep enough into this that if someone comes up with a compellingly unique new variation on the pinhole I might expand my collection.

*Northumbria, Rouge Park, Toronto, June 2022*

The most unexplored venue for pinhole work right now is portraiture, and though I’ve tried to use a pinhole in nearly every portrait shoot I’ve done since I acquired my first optic (admittedly not as much as I’d have liked), I don’t think I’ve scratched the surface of what’s possible with pinhole in portraiture. The shot above is a kind of halfway point between a portrait and a landscape, and barely a feint at what I think I can accomplish with this idea.

The pinholes have taken a place that my Holga camera used to occupy – a kind of shooting that forces me to think less about fine technical details that I can control and concentrate instead on light and composition. It’s the sort of creative practice that was popular in photo school (or so I’m told – I never went), though I’d say that it’s more useful to a photographer later in their career, when habits and preferences have worn a rut in your working methods.

It’s hard to describe just what the appeal is; my pinholes sometimes evoke a painting, at other times the 19th century pictorialist photography I love so much. Whatever the case, they’ve plugged into some photo I have in my head and need to get out – some sort of dreamlike, bleary image that was waiting to be discovered in my memory.

I can’t help but be pleased with my progress in pinhole work (though there are peers and family who are vocally dubious about the whole endeavour). I can’t help but note that, barely a year into taking up the pinhole, I managed to get my work published in a book, which is as satisfying as it’s vindicating. I think I have a lot more to accomplish with my pinholes, though it feels like I’ve reached a fork in the road in terms of what to attempt next, though that might just be a way of getting myself pumped up for the new year from the depths of hated winter.