These Pinhole Portraits Require 11 Minutes of Posing

How long can you strike a certain pose and stay perfectly still? For pinhole photographer Israel Caballero‘s project Veneno Dulce (“Sweet Poison”), models were required to stand and sit motionless in front of his camera for over 10 minutes at a time.

The long exposure time is what’s required for enough light to get through the tiny pinhole aperture to expose the 8×10 sheets in Caballero’s camera. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how the portraits were made — we see how one model held her pose for 11 straight minutes:

Since the models will inevitably move around by small amounts during the course of the exposure, the portraits generally end up with a blurry look to them:

This is actually what posing was like in the early days of photography. Daguerreotypes sometimes required subjects to sit still for upwards of 20 minutes at a time, leading to strange contraptions for keeping subjects heads in place… and many comics poking fun at photography as well.

You can find more portraits from Veneno Dulce over on Caballero’s website.

(via Israel Caballero via Phogotraphy)

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Image credits: Video and photographs by Israel Caballero and used with permission