Lensloos: Pinhole photography and more

In the center of Leiden, close to the train station, is a cafe called “Eigen Zorg”.
This what it looks like from the outside:

Everyone that enters this café is surprised: it’s like going back 50 years in time.
The tables and chairs, the dark wood panels, the reading table and the old huge television, the drinking cups, all is unchanged since the sixties. So I have started to take pinhole  pictures. It’s close to an office location where I regularly work, so I can hop in during lunch hour, order a coffee, and set up my camera. Usually no more than two or three shots at a time, because some spots in the room ask for exposure of 20 minutes or so.

But as the lady that owns and runs the place is full of nice stories and witty remarks, that’s not a bad thing to do. I once returned and announced that I needed to place the camera for way longer exposures than the last time, and she responded “that’s OK, I’m open till eleven this evening” 🙂
These are the first pictures I took (you can see the owner in the second one, chatting for the four minute exposure):


And this is a picture taken in the back of the room:

There are more pictures to find there, and I’m still returning regularly to place the camera (the 8Banners Mb in 6X12 mode) on other spots in the room, on the bar, near the window and so on.
So I’m gradually building up a series of pinhole pictures, that will form a portrait of a café where time has stood still. I will then  create a nice gallery on this site.
And of course I will take a few prints for the lady at Eigen Zorg to keep!

Together with some pinhole friends I visited Udo Prinsen in his atelier (workshop).

Udo was introduced to pinhole in one of my workshop-lectures at “foto De Zavel”, like this one: CAFU)  in Utrecht, and he got hooked 🙂
Udo is fascinated by light and time, and he also started to do solargraphy. And this august he went along with a two-week expedition to Spitsbergen, accompanying a group of scientist as (the only) visual artist.

A few of the cameras

We spent an evening in his studio, listening to his stories on the trip, on the solargraph cameras that he placed, and enjoying the results that he took back.

As you don’t have many opportunities to get so close to the north pole, Udo took a lot of cameras along, hoping to get enough results to work with, and even sent out an installation with a series of cameras attached to it to Spitsbergen by mail. The Dutch ‘scientist in residence’ placed this installation on the roof of a building, set for a two-month exposure. Udo himself placed cameras on Spitsbergen at arrival, and collected them just before returning, so these were two-week exposures.

Some great images came out of it, which you can see (and buy) on his site The SEES project

There was a nice surprise for me involved: whenever I give a workshop on pinhole, I hand out some pinholes to take home and try out, or lend out one of my cameras. The reward that I ask is a pinhole print, whenever something succeeds. This expands my collection of pinhole images by other people than myself. I also join print exchanges, so my collection is from all over the world.

Udo gave me one of his prints, so now I’m the proud owner of a solargraph that was taken on Spitsbergen!

See more information on the expedition, the project and the solargraphs at  The SEES project.

I have placed a new ’tech article’ (in English) on the Anamorph camera, it’s here in the tech section: link

It’s an article on the strangest camera I own, made by a Polish manufacturer…

At holiday, in Bretagne, we noticed this spot, near our rented mobile home. Beautiful, with the last rays of the sun lighting up that small house at the end of the peninsula.
But I did not carry my pinhole camera.Next day: rainy and cloudy…
A few days later, the sun was there, with some clouds, so I walked the 30 min. to the edge. Upon arriving, the sun just went after some clouds and didn’t return.
But the next day was sunny, including the evening at sunset. So back again, and the 8Banners MB camera was set up at a low wall aligning the beach and small road to the house. Here it is, exposing for some 4 minutes:

It was well worth the repeated walks (which wasn’t that bad, actually a nice walk along the coast). Here is the resulting pinhole image, which will be in the Bretagne gallery: