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Spot-light #9 – Tina Rowe

Can you tell us about yourself as an artist?
All I wanted to do when I was at school was to go to art college and learn about colour theory and how to draw better, I was already pretty good at drawing. I would occasionally buy Rolling Stone and I was aware of people like Annie Lebovitz, who I thought was amazing but I wanted to be an illustrator. I got to art school and it was a profound disappointment. Our tutors all seemed to be conceptualists and my interests were seen as reductive. Then a couple of weeks in my dad died suddenly. My already limited interest was curtailed by all the grief and sleeplessness. About
that time they sent us over to the technical college for three sessions in the darkroom. I’d wanted to understand how to print a photograph and that’s exactly what we did. The unexpected bonus was, of all the processes we did at art school, the darkroom was the most exacting and as a result, for three hours a week, I didn’t have the brain space to think about the horrific hole that had opened up in my life. The rest of the foundation year was spent in search of things that gave me some kind of respite from the relentless sadness and inability to escape it through
making things. Instead I found it in the Odeon watching things like Phantasm, Alien and Kentucky Fried Movie, learning to wait for Guinness in the Lamb and Flag and getting high near the cricket ground. At the end of the first year I was invited not to go back for the second.


Why do you work with pinhole cameras?
I got my father’s Praktika SLR as he no longer needed it, and nobody else was all that interested in using it, and started taking it with me everywhere, I still have some old shots of people I used to go to the pub with. This habit developed, these days I have a lot of weird and wonderful cameras. But my collection really got going after 2000 when bought my first medium format. From there I got interested in alt processes while I was working in Leeds and I joined groups on Flickr which led to further exploring and it was somewhere in that that I started to see some interesting pinhole work. I had a Nikon D70 by then and I made a digital pinhole, took a shit photo of the window in my spare room and forgot about it. My husband didn’t and for my birthday I got a Lomo 120, which I found wildly disappointing until I was noodling about in Camden and took this photo.

I was really fascinated by the stasis and movement. Up until then I’d only really seen pinhole shots of waterfalls and hadn’t come across Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows (https://www.alexeytitarenko.com/cityofshadows, I do know this work was made with a hasselblad and not a pinhole, so need to @me) so I kind of thought I was a genius for a couple of minutes. After that shot, I took the pinhole with me everywhere I went.
In 2012 joined the darkroom that I stayed with until 2024 and started to be part of a community that enabled me to broaden my ideas about cameras and film. Two of the other members became close friends and we all went to Paris for my 50th . We went out and got absolutely trashed. The next day we limped to a restaurant called Chartier, which is quite a tourist trap. I put my camera in the coat rack above our table and left the shutter open throughout the meal. My friends thought I was nuts, but this is what I thought I’d get and I was right. I really like the way that slowing down time just intensifies what you get to see. The waiters were zooming about and as a result, they just completely disappear in the image. The diners form pools of relationships, I think it’s especially noticeable at the front where there is a group of
three people.

I took the pinhole with me to Brazil and got my all time favourite Lomo shot on a small gauge train in the middle of nowhere. I reckoned that the rocking motion of the train would make an interesting set of patterns, what I didn’t expect was the colour mixing and still the image didn’t turn into a blurry mush. If anything I think the image
gives a sense of what it felt like to be on the train.

I stopped using the tripod for most shots and started handheld long exposures. I took it on the bus..

We went to the fair..

Including on some of the rides..

I love the way even though it is now very abstract, it is still recognizable. I think there is a real feel of energy and motion that is never available in a static shot. I started to think about how I could use the duration of an exposure to make an image, so I did thinks like go up and down escalators for the length of an exposure.
This is 20 minuites going up and down at the Tate Modern some time in 2008.

Or push the camera against the window at the front of a bus during a journey.

I burned through an awful lot of slide film while I learned to use the camera. At some point in 2015 I came across the RSS 6×17. It was love at first sight. It is such a cinematic camera and I got it about the time that The Hateful Eight came out so 2015 was the year of super wide for me. It also has a tiny pinhole that means really long exposures and because it’s solid and strong, unlike the lomo, it just feels serious. So I instigated a protracted campaign of heavy hints until Andy bought me the RSS 6×17 for my birthday.

I took it with me to New York in 2016 and stood next to it in Grand Central Terminus for an hour while this exposure happened.

I think it was you James who pointed out the way the destination boards have become mush. I had been distracted by the peopleish smears by the ticket windows. It was actually a really nice experience as lots of people stopped and asked me what I was doing, and when I told them it was a pinhole camera, many of them told me how they’d made them at school, which blew me away as I’d have loved that.
I’m also aware that this shot had been building in my head ever since I saw The Fisher King specifically the scene in the station where Robin Williams sees Amanda Plumer as she walks through a crowd of commuters who suddenly start waltzing like a flash mob all around her and him as he watches, but somehow in a natural, kinda clunky way. Then, all of a sudden, the music stops and everybody goes back to being a commuter while Plummer disappears in the direction of the subway. https://youtu.be/u73s-opueLk?si=GMf4pZaBY6V4miu_ it’s a beautiful moment in a film I remember really fondly. But it’s the idea of stuff going on in an intensely personal way in public spaces that really interests me. I frequently find myself thinking about what would happen if I… For the past three years I’ve mainly been thinking about colour reversal on paper, and splitting images into their constituent colours and reconstructing them. I wasn’t sure why I was doing that for a long time, but now I realise it’s a way to highlight the tools that make an image as I think that is the most interesting part of any kind of image making. This interest in the perceived limitations of film use has led me down some unexpected paths. I did a residency at the Revela-T festival in Spain in 2016. I took the Lomo as an afterthought, but I ended up making a body of work with it because I’d also taken bookbinding equipment like thread, needles, rubber bands and glue. We had access to a derelict factory that had started manufacturing luxury fabrics, but the industry declined and it ended up as a place where t-shirts were screen printed with smutty illustrations for the tourists in Majorca. I found a load of screens that I suspended using the bookbinding stuff, and then gradually cut down during the exposures.

I like the way it isn’t clear what is happening, only that something is happening. I really like ghost stories so the work is called Who is this Who Comes, which is an important plot point from MR James’s O whistle and I’ll come to you my lad.
An absolute banger of a story. Thinking about agency came in really useful when I photographed Noemi Lakmaier’s
Cherophobia performance. Noemi is a wheelchair user and she wanted to levitate, which is an entirely reasonable thing for any human to want to do, but only the properly curious put in the work, so she got a few thousand balloons and filled them with helium and they were used to lift her off the ground. It was such a beautiful piece. I went to see the project being dismantled and this image is one that I made on the day.

I also started to explore my own presence in images with the RSS. I have a weird relationship with the camera which is doubtless related to my experience as a transracial adoptee. When I look at my family, I see people I feel familiar with, but when I look at photographs of us, I also see that half of me isn’t from Worcestershire, it’s from the Horn of Africa. The way I look has not always garnered the most pleasant attention and there isn’t much I can do about it. So although I like photographs, on the whole, I didn’t like being in them. I finally went to art school in 2015 as an associate at Open School East. We did a residency in Cornwall and I met James Hankey (insta: @hankeyjames), while I was there. He was making some remarkable images around the Cornish coast, photographing at night with a large format camera and using lights, and in some cases fire, to make marks on the film. His ethereal images were hugely influential on me and I started to experiment using the RSS and the torch on my phone. This was the first experiment I made in the hall of the Rose Lipman building. I put the camera on the stage. Arranged a few chairs and walked around them to draw a hovering carpet.

I liked this and started to use the camera and torches outside. This has become an ongoing project called Mark Making in Public Places. Because of the nature of the camera, the exposures have to be long. That leaves me time to make a series of pre planned movements during the exposure. The exposure is always done in daylight, usually in a fairly busy place.

This way I am present in those images, but what you see of me is what I want you to see.

I’ve not had much time to indulge my pinhole ideas over the past three years. I’m coming to the end of a PhD now and next I plan to spend more time with my RSS. I’m still really interested in the juxtaposition of stasis and intense movement. I used the RSS to photograph the pro Palestine marches in central London earlier in the
year. But it did take me 6 months to use all 4 shots.

Don’t do a PhD kids. Instead I recommend you waste film. Give your tripod a holiday. Make James rich.

Find Tina at her website: https://tinarowe.co.uk

Instagram: @tinarororo

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Spot-light #8 – Robert Strahinjić

Hi Robert, can you tell us a bit about yourself why you shoot pinhole?

There are moments that cannot be measured in seconds. Moments that stretch, as if time itself is holding its breath. For me, pinhole photography is a way to capture those moments. No lens, no autofocus, no rush, just a small hole letting light pass through. In a world where speed has become a measure of worth, pinhole photography is a quiet act of resistance.

My love for photography began in my early twenties, during the last years of the analog era. My first camera, a German Beirette, was a gift from my father. That moment sparked a creative fire in me, a desire to express, to create.
Soon after, I embraced the digital wave, which was booming at the time. Even today, most of my work is done with a digital camera. I started with landscape photography, it offered a way to escape the chaos of everyday life and reconnect with peace. Later, when I joined a photography club, I began to explore other genres: drone photography, street photography, portraits, and visual storytelling, mostly in black and white, which remains closest to my heart
now.

In the back of my mind analog photography never truly left me also because some members in our photographic club still made analog photos. Two years ago, the passion returned. This time with the gift of a few vintage Praktica models, followed by my purchase of three classic 6×6 cameras: a Lubitel, a Holga, and an Rolleiflex from the year 1951. Then in 2024 during a Pinhole Day workshop something clicked, and that initial spark turned into a burning passion.

I was first introduced to pinhole photography about 13 years ago by Marko Vogrič, now the president of our photography club Skupina 75. Marko is working with pinhole photography for over 20 years and is well known in Italy for his series “Miška po svetu” (“Little Mouse Around the World”). For years, he encouraged us to build pinhole cameras from cardboard and wooden boxes or modified old cameras and photographing on photographic paper or film during annual Pinhole Day workshops.
As I said in the year 2024 something clicked and I decided to take pinhole photography more seriously, exploring it through a hybrid approach: analog shooting combined with digital darkroom techniques. This blend of old and new has opened up completely new creative directions for me.

By profession, I’m an accountant, a job that can be very stressful. Photography, quite literally, saves me. Especially now pinhole photography. Because pinhole is not just a method, it’s a way of being. It teaches us that slowness can be beautiful, that imperfection can be pure, and that sometimes the smallest opening leads to the largest door.
Thank you Marko very much for showing me the door and encouraging me to walk through into the quiet, meditative world of pinhole photography.

Can you tell us about your landscape photography? Where do you shoot?
What film stocks do you prefer?

My approach to landscape photography is deeply intuitive. Before I even set up the camera, I already have the final image visualized in my mind. Working with a pinhole camera (also digital cameras), this kind of previsualization is essential for me—every decision matters, and nothing is left to chance.

With pinhole camera I shoot my landscapes under overcast skies, as I’m drawn to quiet, dramatic moods and soft, diffused light. I often work early in the morning or late in the afternoon, when the sun is low and cloud textures become more pronounced. This is also very important for me when the sky is not cloudy. On very cloudy days I can work all day. These conditions allow for longer exposures, which enhance atmosphere and bring movement into the stillness, especially in the sky and on water surfaces. On windy days also on trees and grass what makes the motif even more dynamic.
My subjects include both well-known and undiscovered locations, but I’m especially drawn to scenes with water, rivers, lakes, ponds, even the sea. Water calms me, much like the mountains do. I haven’t fully explored mountainous landscapes with my pinhole camera yet, but I plan to, those scenes inspire me deeply and i know that time will come also for pinhole mountain landscapes.


For now, I’m captivated by small ponds, quiet lakes, and solitary chapels nestled in the landscape, places where nature and silence create something sacred. I don’t chase postcard perfection, I wait for authentic moments that carry emotion. In my pinhole photography, I work with black and white film, as it aligns best with the moody, atmospheric quality I seek in my images.

My go-to choice is Fomapan 100—it handles long exposures beautifully, delivers a wide tonal range, and produces a slightly raw, classic look that complements the minimalist nature of pinhole work.

Do you post-process to get this moody dark look to your images?

Since my final output is a fine art digital print in the carbon technique, I do use a digital darkroom to complete the vision I began in the field. But the process starts much earlier, before any editing.
The visual mood is something I’m already aiming for when I shoot. I always look for soft, diffused light and overcast conditions to naturally create a calm, darker atmosphere.


When exposure times exceed one second and in my case always does, I manually adjust the reciprocity failure compensation. Instead of strictly following the values calculated by phone apps, I reduce the exposure time based on my own field experience. This often results in slightly darker exposures, which I then refine also digitally if needed.

So, the final image is really a combination of everything: pinhole camera on film, carefully chosen light conditions, deliberate field technique, and yes also subtle work in the digital darkroom. All these steps are part of the same vision, to create images that reflect a quiet, contemplative mood.
I’m not interested in working fully in analog from start to finish, but I respect those who do.

You used the RSS 4x5z to shoot these photos. Why did you choose this
camera? Do you use filters when shooting?

About a year ago, I decided to invest in a more serious, professional 4×5 pinhole camera. At the time, I was already using a multiformat camera for 120 film, but I wanted to move to a larger format, mainly to have more flexibility when cropping without losing image quality, especially if I needed to produce larger prints.


Another important feature I was looking for was the ability to use multiple focal lengths with a single camera. This approach is both more practical when shooting on location and more cost-effective, as it essentially gives me four cameras in one. While researching what was available on the market, I found several options, but two of the
brands I was also interested in were no longer available. RealitySoSubtle 4x5Z was the only one still being produced, and it immediately appealed to me – both in terms of its design and its price, which is excellent considering what the camera offers. I’ve now been using it for a year and I’m very satisfied – it’s been an outstanding purchase.
As for filters, I don’t use any at the moment, though I’m considering getting an ND filter to further extend exposure times in certain conditions. I don’t feel the need for other types of filters because I also make use of a digital darkroom in my process before fine art carbon printing. Well, we’ll see what the future brings, maybe I’ll give some others a try as well.

Thanks for taking the time to write and share your work!

You can find Robert’s work on instagram @robertstrahinjic

And on facebook.

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Holidays

We’re on holidays until the 3rd of August.

Camera orders are possible and shipping dates shown are accurate. Pinhole orders have been disabled until the 3rd.

Thanks for your understanding!

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New 6×12 and 6×17’s

New 6×12 and 6×17 curved film plane panoramic cameras now available to order. The cameras are upgraded from the previous models to include a 3rd central pinhole and 84mm (Cokin P) filter mount. Ergonomics have also been improved – loading is much easier due to the removeable insert.