From: "karl Shah-Jenner" > I took a bunch of macro pinhole shots of ants with a bridge as a backdrop > with a 35mm camera. ...not particularly sharp ...fast moving ants ...Diffraction ...cirles of confusion ...physical size Right on Karl, You got all the factors that make it impossible to get "sharp-macro-pinhole" images. - 35mm camera: means you have to blow the neg and any fuziness coming from the pinhole process by a factor of manyfold before getting an image of useful dimension. By that time, the fuziness has become blurrrrrrr... - Diffraction: even with the best pinhole drilled to the most optimal focal length diameter, diffraction from the edges of the pinhole will kill the sharpness at any point on the negative. With large format, this is less of a problem, but it's a killer with 35mm... - Circles of confusion and physical size of objects: ditto... - Fast moving ants: did you say multi-second exposures on these little creature with the pinhole-to-ant distance of only a centimeter or two...? -:) Testing time..! How goes it out on the west coast? Then dd-b said: >Studio flash will probably be necessary to get enough light. > Dave, with pinhole, you operate in the aperture ranges of F/120 and above, far above the traditional range of F/8 - /22 for lens cameras. Moving from one scale to the next means usually quite a number of F/stops, which in terms of number of flash bursts will go like this: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ... By the time you have covered all the light requirements, the flash heads glow in the dark... Greg: Hey, why not try it anyway... I was teaching a pinhole workshop this weekend and did some comparative shots to show the students with each shot on 35mm being shot once with a lens and once with a pinhole on the body cap. Very interesting how the images compare. Do not (repeat do not) show the two on the same page... Grrrr.... Best regards, Guy
