Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

April 27th was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. I have been participating for the last few years with a pinhole camera of some sort. I enjoy making photographs with pinhole cameras because they are so simple and create these incredibly dreamy and unpredictable photographs.

This year I procrastinated, although I knew what camera I was going to use. It is a Whitman's chocolate box sampler that I knew would make a perfect pinhole camera.

I didn't do much to modify the camera, just a bit of red paint inside to insure the light wouldn't bounce around and expose the paper negative. I should have used black paint, but alas it was a last minute build the day before I was going to shoot with it, so I used what I had in the house.

 The pinhole was made with a push pin and a Coke can, affixed to the camera with some electrical tape.

I decided that building a camera at the last minute wasn't enough of the challenge, I was going to try a developer I had never used before in pinhole photographs. I mixed up some Caffenol CM developer that would normally be used for developing film. I love this developer because it is so environmentally friendly. The ingredients are water, washing soda, vitamin C and instant coffee.

After setting up the temporary darkroom in my downstairs bathroom, I mixed up the ingredients for the developer and started loading the camera. I brought in my small paper trimmer because I thought I would have to cut down the photo paper I was using as a negative. Alas a 5x7 sheet of photographic paper fits perfectly in the back of the camera! Again a lucky discovery. Four pieces of tape in small loops held the paper firmly in place during the exposure.

Outside I went, and I had no idea what the exposure would be, or how the paper negatives would react to the Caffenol CM developer. I guessed my exposure at one minute fifteen seconds under mostly sunny almost midday skies and returned to the darkroom to take a look a the first image. It is a little strange developing paper in a developer that looks like Guinness, but after about 70 seconds of agitation my first negative came out, and it was perfect! I really was doing well with this camera build.

Caffenol CM developer (top), water for a stop bath and regular Hypo for fix. Two negatives sit in fix after being developed. They are 5x7 sheets of Arista.EDU ultra RC pearl finish printing paper.

I was able to fit in five exposures before having to call it quits. Of the five negatives, only one was blurry due to the winds picking up at the tail end of my shoot and blowing the camera around. So how did they turn out? Very well indeed! This to date has been the easiest pinhole camera I have built. The negatives came out sharp and contrasty, the camera had no light leaks, and I was very impressed with the results.

Four good negatives air dry in the bathroom.

I scanned all the negatives and flipped them to positives in Photoshop. The negs only needed slight tweaking, and just a bit of sharpening. Overall the images were very sharp. I loved the blurry trees and moving limbs, since it was windy that day and anything moving during the minute and fifteen second exposure would be blurry.

First exposure is off the deck looking into my back yard. The round spot is where the pool will go up again later this year.

Second exposure is of a happy dandelion growing in my vegetable garden framed by trees and sky. 

Third image is of the Salt Fork River behind my house looking west.

Fourth image is of the Salt Fork River looking east. This is the photo I selected for my Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day submission.

Just to try out another new technique, I decided to try and make a cyanotype of my paper pinhole negatives. This was the biggest struggle of them all. The paper of the negative blocks a lot of the light from going through which made the exposures very long. I have a small indoor UV lightbox I built to make cyanotypes and even at four hours of exposure I still only had a faint image.

I took matters into nature's hands, and made the cyanotype outdoors using regularly available sunshine. Even with direct UV light from the sun, it still took 2 hours of contact printing to get decent results.

Hand painted cyanotype emulsion with paper pinhole negative.

 Overall this was a fun project, and I have yet another fun pinhole camera to use again.

Here is a link to the website, and a link to my submission this year.  It is submission #1862, which is a perfect number for me!

Pinhole camera fun!

I have been making pinhole cameras since my college days. A pinhole camera is amazingly simple technology. All that is needed is a light tight container of some sort with a pinhole poked in it to let in light.

These cameras can be as simple or as complexed as you want them to be. I have used many different containers from cookie tins, cardboard boxes and my favorite; mini Pringles chip cans.

Earlier this week I built a pinhole camera out of an old Kodak paper box left over from my newspaper days. In fact this particular box came from The Times in Ottawa, because it was the last newspaper I worked at where we actually made black and white prints from negatives. Shortly after I started, we started scanning everything, so this box is probably about 20 years old by now. This box had some photo junk in it of some sort, stored away in the back of a closet. I freed the box from it's lowly storage life and made it into a camera!

My Kodak "Professional" pinhole camera.

The "lens" of the camera is a piece of aluminum liberated from a pop can. A Sun Drop pop can to be exact. A sewing needle is gently drilled through the aluminum, and then it is lightly sanded to remove the burr and then taped to the front of the box. You can see my fancy tape job as well as my tape "shutter"  which is just a piece of black electrical tape.

The "film" in this particular camera is 8x10 photographic paper. Photographic paper is light sensitive, and I think has an ISO rating of about 3 which makes it a pretty slow emulsion. Not quite as slow as wet plate collodion, but still pretty slow. You can use regular film in your pinhole camera, I just like the ease of loading a camera with photo paper, because you can load and unload the camera in a red safe light darkroom.

Here is the camera, with the "film"  some Ilford pearl finish RC paper. Ilford paper in a Kodak box, that is just blasphemy!

 After building the camera, I took it outside and made some exposures. After a little bit of trial and error, I found the magic exposure number to be about one minute under mostly overcast afternoon skies.

The photos were processed in a makeshift darkroom in my windowless bathroom. All that was needed was a card table, one safe light, trays and photo chemistry.

My pinhole darkroom under safelight conditions.

A negative sits in the fix, after being developed.

As you can see from the above photo, the negatives are nice and large. The size of the box determines the focal length, and this particular box becomes a super wide angle 8x10 camera. It vignettes a bit on the negative, but I like the effect.

A series of six 8x10 paper negatives drying after being developed and washed.

And the result: Pretty nice photos! The images are fairly crisp and have a good exposure. Pinhole cameras are a fun way to learn about photography, because of their simple design and the inexpensive materials needed to make images.

A view of my back yard. The heart shaped mark was made by my kids, when they built their snowman. You can just barely see the snowman in the lower right corner of the photo.

A self portrait on the back stairs of my deck. I did pretty good sitting still for a minute long exposure!