“I like snappy!” said Dan Bouman, pouring selenium toner into a tray. The selenium works on the silver adhering to the grey and black parts of the image, warming them subtly and deepening the field of contrast – or as Dan says, “making them nice and snappy!”

As traditional lens-shot cast photos from the latest Driftwood production rise from the developer, Dan explained that prior to 1992, he’d never owned or used a camera. It all seemed to complex, he claimed. But an introduction to photography’s most basic and accessible tool – the pinhole camera – fascinated him.

With roots stretching back 4,000 years to the camera obscura, the pinhole technique requires no expensive equipment, no lens – just a lightproof box, sheet of photographic paper or film, and a pin. Dan was delighted by its simplicity and the fact that the creative process was “handmade” from the start (building the tools) to finish (developing the image).

Pinhole images tend to be difficult to print, Dan discovered. The image has a diffused, dreamy quality and much more contrast than a traditional “lens-captured” photograph. Capturing a crisp image such as the self-portrait on this page required a careful study of natural light, and trial and error in the field and the darkroom.

“So by the time I started printing normal negatives from lens cameras, I knew a lot about the process. I’d become used to working with difficult paper negatives.” Photo paper is a cheap alternative to film for pinhole cameras, which produce a negative image on paper. This is then contact printed in the darkroom to create a positive image.

“For thousands of years, people have known a pinhole in a lightproof boxwill project an image,” Dan notes, but the challenge of getting the image out of the box wasn’t met until the 1800s when Nicéphore Niépce combined the camera obscura with photosensitive paper. Henry Fox Talbot followed this discovery with the chemical process of creating a paper negative and the contact printing process. Within a few decades, photo studios were springing up all over Europe and North America and the march towards today’s instant digital images was underway.

But they all began with a lightproof box.

Any place that can be made lightproof can be made into a camera, and Dan will be creating a room-sized camera obscura at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery in April as part of their Light”exhibition of photography. The installation will demonstrate how images are formed, and how moving the receptor – angling it to the pinhole, moving it closer or further away – affects the image quality and look. The question he expects to be asked most is “why is the image upside down?” Be prepared for a physics lecture on the nature of light.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Dan’s workshop Introduction to Pinhole Photography on April 22 will provide the hands-on basics of this very accessible art form. Participants will also be in the field on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day April 24. Images captured on this day will be submitted to the Pinhole Day website (www.pinholeday.org), taking their place with others from around the world.

A big part of the joy of pinhole photography “is the freedom to make the camera do whatever you want – for example, to simply adjust the box dimension to achieve wide-angle or telephoto effects. You may have to use grade 8 math to figure the effect, but it’s all do-able, it’s easy,” says Dan.

Register for the workshop or investigate the walk-through pinhole camera at Gibsons Public Art Gallery, downstairs at 271 Gower Point Road, Gibson’s Landing. Open Wed. - Sun., 1 – 4.