pinhole 4x5

Hi. Can you take a sheet of 4x5 film exposed in a pinhole camera

and enlarge it to a bigger size? I read something that said they

only tolerated very little enlargement.

Thanks

Of course you can enlarge it. I've seen 35 mm pinhole negatives enlarged to reasonable viewing size (4x6 inches) without becoming too fuzzy to view -- with a 4x5 original, you could easily print to 8x10 without excessive fuzziness, and might be able to go 11x14; I'd expect 16x20 to be pushing things, though, unless you're trying to emphasize the "everything is just as slightly fuzzy as everything else" DOF effect the pinhole gives.

OTOH, I've seen 4x5 pinhole photos that almost didn't look like pinhole -- with the reduction involved in scanning them to the web, they looked as sharp as what you'd get from a soft focus portrait lens. This is partly because the hole size gets smaller, relative to the "focal length", and people usually shoot at a longer effective focal length in larger format. Some enlargement might be a very good thing if you want them to look like pinhole images.

Yes. You'll get a big fuzzy picture, not a big sharp picture, but if that's what you want, go for it.

A 4x5 contact print and an 8x10 print viewed from twice as far away should be very similar. If you blow your 4x5 print up to poster size, it will look okay from across the room, and be a mess of blur when viewed up close.

Sometimes people on here ask "How big can I enlarge my 35mm photo" and the answer is similar- depends on what is acceptable to you.