Hello, I hope I'm not posting this in a drastically incorrect place, as I wasn't sure where LF pinhole photography fit .

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience doing pinhole macro photography, which they could share in terms of equipment, technique and overall feasibility.

I've been interested in fairly extreme macro photography for awhile now but have found it overall extremely frustrating. I started with medium format but graduated to 4x5 with the prospect of getting in even closer. While I've had some successes, I've found the whole thing extremely difficult in terms of the precision of setup required, and particularly the sensitivity to very small changes of position that occur from things like putting in film holders, moving the focusing cloth, the flapping wings of nearby butterflies, etc. ...

My partner suggested I try pinhole, given that the setup is easier and more robust, the small size of the aperture means that I don't have to worry so much about the precision of my focal plane, and the lack of ground glass at the back means I have to let go of my control-freakishness about trying to perfect the composition (and then often being disappointed when it's changed slightly from what I thought it was).

We've tried some exposures, but our pinhole camera is a wide-angle, 75mm focal length camera with a pinhole optimised to focus at infinity. This means that very close objects appear extremely soft, not sharp at all. We contact-print, and I like to print directly from 4x5 negatives without enlarging, so my negatives don't need to be razor-sharp; but the lack of sharpness with our pinhole for near subjects it pretty extreme and not really usable.

We were wondering about trying to get a long focal length camera (on the order of 225mm focal length) with a pinhole optimised for objects about 4-5cm away rather than optimised for infinity. Does anyone know if this is do-able?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts ,
Sharon