Alternative to traditional pinhole on an 8x10

[Greg]

Was out a few weeks ago and set my 8x10 camera to shoot down on some skunk cabbage leaves coming up out of the ground. Stopped down to f/64 but still didn't have enough of depth of field. So... had a small piece of thin cardboard with me and poked a tiny hole in it. Removed the front elements of my 12" f/4.5 Wollensak Velostigmat and inserted the pinhole aperture. Guessed at an exposure of 3 minutes and was actually right on. Image attached. Has anyone else ever gone this route? Composing with a pinhole pretty much impossible to do with its more than dim image on the GG. But composing with a lens and then inserting a pinhole aperture into the lens seems to be a very viable way to go. Image does have that "pinhole look" to it.

[desertrat]

My second 8X10 camera purchase came with no lenses but two pinholes. One was a standard pinhole, the other was a 1/4" (6 mm) hole. The bigger hole gave a very fuzzy image, but let in enough light in broad daylight to compose on the GG.

Don't remember if I ever used it, though.

[Mark Woods]

I determined the focal length of my pinhole lenses, compose with a "normal" lens of the same focal length, then swap it out for the pinhole lens. Works great.

[photog_ed]

I remember hearing (reading?) that Edward Weston did this. His famous Pepper #30 was done in a similar way (he put the front element back on), and I recall the exposure was several hours at f/256.

[Mark Woods]

When I stayed at Wild Cat Hill and spoke with Kim Weston, he said that a lot of those images were made over the course of a day long exposure. He didn't mention anything about pin hole lenses. Could be, I don't know. There's a skylight just outside of where the darkroom is, and it's under this skylight he shot a lot of his still lifes.

[Greg]

"So, Edward made his own stops for his lens, eventually settling on a f/240 aperture — essentially turning the view camera into a pinhole camera. With such a smaller aperture, exposing Pepper No. 30 adequately with natural light required an ultra-long exposure time of about 4-6 hours."
at
https://petapixel.com/2017/08/15/famous-pepper-photo-edward-weston-4hr-exposure-f240/