In January I started taking a self portrait every week. I've found that having little side projects like this nurtures my main creative practice. Sometimes this is in very obvious ways, like using cyanotype printing and adapting that to leather working, but often the benefits are more circuitous.

It is no coincidence that I'm doing this pinhole project in January when I spend time planning for the year to come. I think about where my business is and where I hope to be going. In shooting these self portraits I am getting a new perspective on what I've built and where I fit into it.

Shooting with a pinhole camera is a unique experience. Traditionally you can build them yourself out of coffee cans and VW buses. I use a special kind of lens on my digital camera. Imagine a lens cap with a hole drilled in it. Over that hole is a piece of metal with a very tiny pinhole drilled through it. That whole thing fits over where a camera lens would normally go on your camera. This tiny hole is just small enough to project an image into the camera without the need for glass or all the other things that make up a camera lens.

The result you get is a very soft, almost painterly image. There is no way to focus the pinhole. So everything is just a little blurry. Because the hole is so small the time it takes to expose the picture is usually 5-10 seconds. Anything that moves in that time will be a blur in the final image. The picture is also too dark for me to see in the viewfinder. So I can't focus, can't see what I'm taking a picture of, and (because theses are self portraits) I have to run in front of the camera and I hope I'm in the right place when the shutter opens up.

Sounds like a mess, I know. After shooting a bunch in a row I'll start to get these truly candid pictures of me in the middle of trying to make something interesting. Sometimes I'm mid step, or looking a little frustrated after waiting for the timer to go off. Often I'm holding my breath so I don't move too much while the picture is taken. It's all highly staged but in the act of making it I get these chance moments of truth.

Caught mid step, a little frustrated, and holding my breath is about as honest a portrait of being a small business owner that I can think of.

Through a Pinhole