That’s how the light gets in
I’ve not updated in a while so this blog post is going to be a ramble.
Starting with a trip to Edinburgh to attend a low toxicity pinhole photography workshop that was organised by Agitate Gallery and ran by Hannah Fletcher from Sustainable Darkroom.
This was a fun day at the Edinburgh Photographic Society learning about the use of alternative developers. I got to geek out about the chemical structure of plant polyphenolic acids and make my own pinhole camera out of a film canister container.
For the developer we were using Willow leaves collected near to the building which we boiled for 30 mins, strained then added washing soda and vitamin C powder to obtain the correct ph. (Felt similar to the process I’ve been using at home for developing film with instant coffee, vit c and washing soda.)
Although the main point of the day was to learn more about alternative processes, I was a little bit disappointed that I didn’t have much luck with any of my attempts to get an image on the day.
Expectation (from Back to Basics - The Sustainable Darkroom)
Reality - my lovely grey squares
I played about the scans of the two grey squares that had something at all on them and ended up with some abstract images that I quite liked.
I had also dug out my old Brownie 127 camera in the morning before I left, and found that it had a film sitting in it that must have been from at least 12 years ago. I ended up shooting the last of the roll and deciding it probably wasn’t worth sending away to be developed as the film could be totally degraded by now, used my trusty caffenol recipe to home develop it.
Turned out most of the film was completely blank, with a couple of shots of Largs seafront at the start and then the Edinburgh shots at the end. Tried a new way of ‘scanning’ these with the lightbox and the Canon 5D…but not sure if it actually introduced more digital noise into the mix than just using the app on my phone.
Following the workshop, I was keen to try some more pinhole photography and fell into an internet rabbit hole reading about it, watching youtube videos of people explaining the mechanics in great detail and looking at formulas for calculating exposure based on aperture etc…and in the end just took a hammer to a tin and taped a piece of red bull can that I’d pressed a pin through on top.
I made an attempt to paint the inside black to be less reflective, but I was wanting it to be a bit ad hoc, so didn’t do a particularly good job of it. Behold it in all it’s beauty…I think the tin might have originally been used to keep some sort of pepto bismol medicine….
My friend Dave and I had organised another photography day this weekend, so I took it along to see if I could get any images this time around.
One slight downside of shooting with a random tin is that you kind of need access to a darkroom relatively close by to develop the images. I had made a not very successful attempt at home by putting a piece of exposed paper into a paterson tank in a changing bag and using leftover caffenol from the kodak brownie film to develop….but I realise you really need to be able to see the image developing in real time.
Also, the exposure time for pinhole is very long…so my at home attempt to take an image in my bathroom at night even with an 8 minute exposure…was probably never gonna work anyway.
I also brought along a few other cameras and some film…not realising the amount of time the pinhole experiments would actually take.
Dave had a good idea of using some slightly less expensive photo paper as an exposure test before I started using my Harman direct positive paper. Which meant later on also got to try using these to make contact prints with the enlarger to flip them from negative to positive.
So the first completely terrifying image out of my camera was a 60 second exposure and as I talked all the way through it has warped my face into the stuff of nightmares…..
Original paper image out of the camera on the right, and the positive print on the left…scanned with all the lovely fluff from Matty’s home flatbed scanner.
Let’s just see that again in close up - it’s giving Mason Verger from Hannibal
This was the second one I took where I tried not to talk, still pretty creepy…ironically creepy enough for instagram to label it as AI generated when I uploaded it there.
Was absolutely buzzing to actually have successfully created an image on an first attempt.
Probably spent about another hour trying to take a portrait further up the garden, before deciding that the first one I took as a test for exposure time was actually the best.
This was exactly the sort of blurry vibe I was trying to achieve, but it proved quite difficult to hit the correct amount of movement and stillness and luck of when the sun the came out. Nothing about taking images this way is quick.
The next shot came about because my skin has broken out this week and I knew I would probably be taking self portraits…I ended up shoving this frog mask I got from the second hand shop in my bag in the morning in case I felt too ugly to shoot my actual face - lol - as you do.
Pearl meets I See You?
So, one not as successful pinhole day for images…followed by a much more successful pinhole day, and the successful day also included pizza.
