Lo-Fi Comparison - Konstruktor, P-Sharan and Viddy

I brought a slew of gear with me on my last photography outing for multiple reasons.  I wanted to run my first test roll on my Viddy Pinhole, I wanted to further test my Konstruktor for scratches and double exposures, and I wanted to knock the dust off my P-Sharan pinhole and see if I could get my exposures correct.  As I had all these toys with me, I figured I would also do some comparisons between the lo-fi cameras to get some idea on each camera's perspective on the world by shooting the same scenes with the different cameras.  I was not particularly scientific in my methods - I used my tripod for the pinholes, but hand-held the Konstruktor which means the latter was not necessarily shooting from the exact same spot - but this was more of a general experiment for my own reference of "how much of the scene does the camera see". The Viddy shots are generally fogged from a light leak and the P-Sharan shots are generally underexposed which throws the color off, but I'm ignoring those details for this post and just looking at perspective.

To save myself some labels, my Konstruktor had Fuji 400, the P-Sharan had Kodak Ektar 100, and the Viddy had Ilford HP5 400, and the shots were all done in Wallace Falls State Park, within a half mile of the parking lot.  

For a quick refresher... the P-Sharan is the black camera on the left, the red box is a Viddy, and the Konstruktor is in the blue case... but looks like this:

The Konstruktor has a shutter, which made it easy to hand-hold.  For the pinholes I used the high tech technique of balancing the cameras on my tripod.  The P-Sharan is held together with rubberbands (again... high tech here) so I stretched one band over the edge of the tripod head to keep it steady.

The Viddy was large enough to simply balance, however given the softness of the images I think I will try to strap it down to the tripod next time.

On to the comparisons!

 My first stop along the trail was at the first bridge, using the bridge railings to get an idea of "lens" width and perspective.  The Konstruktor shot was hand held, and not centered on the bridge because I though I already had a centered shot on another roll (that shot turned out to be too dark to scan, so this is what I have)  The P-Sharan and Viddy were in the exact same spot on my tripod (which is the set-up shot you see above)

Konstruktor

P-Sharan

Viddy

Second stop, the other side of the first bridge looking back.  In this example I had the Konstruktor generally shooting the same scene - the difference being that I held it below my chin for viewing, and had set up the pinholes on the tripod roughly eye-level.  The Viddy ended up being turned slightly right on the tripod so the bridge was not centered.

Konstruktor

P-Sharan

Viddy

Shot # 3 - the small falls.  To get to this spot, you take a little spur trail off the main trail through which leads to a boardwalk through a thick bunch of raspberry bushes.  Though the falls are only 20 feet from the main trail, close enough to hear people hiking, the spot is secluded by the raspberry bushes.  I spent a good amount of time here experimenting with exposure lengths, and this is probably the most accurate comparison of the 3 cameras shooting from the same spot.

Konstruktor

P-Sharan

Viddy

One last comparison shot, these were taken from the hiking trail looking down at the river, right where the trail leaves the river and begins to climb to the main viewpoint for Wallace Falls.

Konstruktor

P-Sharan

Viddy

The basic end conclusion I've drawn is that the Konstruktor is a fairly standard view, the P-Sharan is quite wide, and the Viddy is pretty zoomed in.  This experiment gives me a better idea of how much of a given scene each camera will see.  

Up until now, all my exposures have been "poke-n-hope", looking at the scene and guessing whether the camera will consider it "cloudy" or "partly cloudy", etc...  Unfortunately, as I said earlier, many of my shots were underexposed as a result.  Since this outing I attended a pinhole photography lecture, and having taken what I learned there, and with a little bit of research online, I've managed to find enough information on my two pinhole cameras to utilize one of the many pinhole calculation apps which are available on the web.  The Viddy's pinhole measurement is listed on the description of the camera, and I measured the distance from the pinhole to the film plane to get the focal length, the calculator gives me the f/stop from there. My P-Sharan has the f/stop and focal length printed on the front of the camera.  I was unable to find the pinhole size online because my model of camera is no longer available, but the calculator did the math with the numbers I have and came up with a pinhole size.  The size is incredibly close to what is advertised for the new model of P-Sharan, so assuming they use the same pinhole size, the calculator seems accurate enough.  On future trips I'll be using my DSLR to meter the scene, and plug that into the calculator for each camera to come up with an exposure length.  Even if it is not perfect, it should be far less "poke-n-hope".