AT A TIME when mobile phones can take photos and there's a new digital camera offering ever higher resolution every few months, a group of amateur photographers are bucking the hi-tech trend by going back to basics with pinhole photography.
'It's fun,' says Alvin Hui Hau-wing, a recent convert. 'The effect of a picture from a pinhole camera cannot be generated with digital technology. The mood is totally different from what you capture with ordinary or digital cameras. It's not about purchasing expensive cameras and equipment. Everything is about returning to basics.'
Hui and his friends got hooked on the technique after taking part in a workshop, two years ago, on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. The annual event, held on the last Sunday of April, was launched in 2001.
'At the time, most of us had never come across pinhole photography before,' he says. 'We found out there was a Pinhole Photography Day through our online forum and someone suggested organising a session to introduce the method.'
The group invited veteran pinhole photographers to discuss their hobby, and made cameras from cardboard boxes and black tape.
Pinhole cameras operate without a lens. Essentially a light-sealed box, the device allows light reflected from an object to enter through a tiny hole at one end, and the image is captured at the other end on material infused with light-sensitive chemicals.
