Black & White Nature Photos by Max Cooper [Pinhole Photography]

Black & White Landscape Photography by Max Cooper

Max Cooper is experienced professional photographer who specializes in weddings and fine art photography.

And since no one we know here at Mountain Made is getting hitched this year — as you can see, it’s Max’s wonderful skill in pinhole camera photography that has caught our eye.

Pinhole camera photography is known for its ethereal or other-worldly look and feel.

Max says about his pinhole camera work, “As a ‘local,’ I see crowds everywhere, holding up their phones. Or other photographers, just like me, with all their gear.

We visit the most beautiful places and complicate them with our gadgets and our agendas to show other people we’ll never meet that we were there.”

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Max goes on to say, “But a pinhole camera is simple. Its tiny aperture is literally nothing: A hole. A lack. A space, like the ones we try desperately to fill in ourselves, but much smaller.

Almost no light passes through, and the light that does is so dim that an exposure must be made over the course of several minutes. It is rendered over time, losing the sharp reproduction of reality that we’ve come to associate with modern photography.”

“For the past two years I’ve been crawling around the mountains with primitive cameras, looking for something that hasn’t yet been captured by everyone else. This is what I’ve found…”

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Check out Max in action on YouTube!

Just click the image below…

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What is Pinhole Camera Photography?

If you are not a camera buff or made one as a kid in school, you need to know that the pinhole camera is a very simple device. A pinhole camera is basically a light-tight box with a tiny hole on one end and film or photographic paper on the other.

Light from outside passes through the pinhole and projects an inverted (upside) image on the opposite side of the box onto the film or paper. This trick of the light is known as the “camera obscura effect”.

The camera itself must be held motionless for at several minutes to capture the image on the film or paper. This creates photos that blur and darken around the edges and seem to be taken in “slow motion”.

Pinhole photography is arguably one of the oldest forms of photography.  But it is still popular today because the limitations and simplicity of the pinhole camera forces the photographer to be extremely patient and focus on the beauty of light and shadow of the scene versus action or movement.

his patience and willing to let the light work its wonders is why we feel that Max’s photos brings a very different perspective to the natural landscapes found here in Western North Carolina.

We invite you to come by and check out Max’s work for yourself the next time are in downtown Asheville > Directions to Mountain Made Art Gallery