Another Paper Negative

  I have made images of these two howitzers in Albuquerque's Plaza Vieja with several of my old cameras.  This picture is from the Bob Eggers pinhole camera loaded with enlarging paper.  The pinhole is the sharpest I have ever come across.  

Unfortunately, I can't seem to adapt my vision to the ultra-wide view produced by the short distance from the pinhole to the film plane, so I have had to crop the image a bit to get closer to what I was intending.  I may go back with my last film holder to see if I can do better with the framing.

The exposure of the paper in the. camera was. 1.5 minutes.  Processing was in HC-110b.  

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While. watching the weekly episode of New Mexico In Focus on Youtube I noticed over in the right column of the screen that there was a video about paper negatives using an old Kodak folding camera.  Of course, I had to watch it.

The presenter, Borut Peterlin, is an entertaining guy who seems to be quite a competent photographer.  He starts out with some useful information about what kind of enlarging paper he likes and points out that film developer performs better in making paper negatives because paper developer tends to produce images that are too contrasty.

Much of the rest of the presentation was rather general, providing information applicable to standard photography techniques rather than specifically to paper.  I suppose that is useful to someone who has not done much actual darkroom work.  For those with more experience, if you know what a good negative or positive looks like there will be little problem in recognizing those desirable qualities in paper negatives,  including appropriate contrast and good detail in both shadows and highlights.

One  important factor which was omitted in the presentation. was the brief pre-flashing of the paper which seems a pretty standard step by most paper negative producers. 

Peterlin's demonstration used a camera with a lens rather than a pinhole.  That meant that he had a lot more latitude in the kind of scenes that he could easily shoot.  His full-sun shots could be accomplished with an exposure of a couple of seconds, which meant that open shade shots would be possible with around a ten to twenty second exposure.  Shooting with a pinhole on paper under those conditions requires thirty to sixty times more exposure. 

Peterlin "scanned" his. paper negatives by hand-holding a digital camera and illuminating the negative with an. overhead light, the same as me.  His end results were quite comparable  to results one would get from shooting on film.

Pinhole at the Rail Yards

The Summer weekend crafts and produce market at the Albuquerque Rail Yards always brings out a big crowd.  I rarely buy any of he offerings,  but I have photographed the place with several of my old film cameras.  I think this is the first time I have used my pinhole camera there.

All the pictures were made with my compact SLIK tripod which has served me well for about. 25 years.  With the legs fully extended and the center column raised, the camera. gets close to chest level.  Collapsing the legs and reversing the center column allows shooting at ground level.

I managed to shoot seven of the available eight frames on a roll of 120 Kentmere 100 before running out of energy.  The outdoor shots were two second exposures.  The good indoor light from the big banks of windows allowed  exposures of around five seconds.  I finished off the roll the next morning with a shot of one of Margaret's houseplants, with a fifteen second exposure.

The Paper Alternative

 I mentioned in a recent blog post that I regretted not getting around to making pinhole photos in a large format.  A day later my friend, Bob Eggers, showed up at my place with a finely crafted pinhole camera he built which accepts 4x5 film holders.  

Bob had loaded a couple holders with pre-flashed printing paper normally used for making enlargements in the darkroom.  Behind the pinhole he had installed a yellow-green filter for the purpose of moderating the paper's tendency to produce overly contrasty images.  So, nothing left for me to do but go out and make the shots and then see what would turn up in the darkroom.  What could be simpler?

Well, making a couple shots in Old Town went well enough, but the long time that had gone by since I was last in a darkroom sabotaged the outcome.

I set up my trays with developer and fixer,  switched on a red light, opened the film holders and popped the exposed paper sheets into the developer.  At which point I realized that I had neglected to turn off the little bathroom nightlight !  

So a couple fogged negatives as a reward for my bumbling effort.

When I got up the next day I noticed that the morning light on the historic Henry Mann house across the street was very nice.  Trial Two went off with no self-inflicted injury this time.  

 

 

I was pleased with the outcome.  The one minute exposures in the camera seemed about right.

I used HC110, dilution B, for the developing. The negatives were dark and somewhat contrasty as expected, but they scanned pretty well using my iPhone.  I put the paper negative into the film holder from my old Epson flatbed scanner to hold it flat and lit it with a table lamp.  That worked well enough, but I also decided to try backlighting the negatives and did that by placing the holder on top of my large LED panel. 

The backlit image may be a tiny bit sharper, but I really saw very little difference from the overhead lamp light.

This was actually my second time for shooting on paper.  The first was about three years ago, also with Bob's considerable assistance.  That endeavor seemed a lot easier as I was using a No.3A Folding Pocket Kodak with an actual lens, a Rapid Rectilinear, which permitted an exposure of just two seconds at f/16.

I may not do much more with paper negatives, but this experience has been fun, and I certainly recommend giving it a try if you are looking for something out of the ordinary in your photographic journey.

Tingley Summer

 Summer heat crashed into Albuquerque well in advance of the summer solstice.  The city's residents are hopeful now that the monsoon rains will arrive on schedule to moderate the solar blast.

From. a 2005 visit to Chaco Canyon:

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The sun announces

The longest day for each year

At Fajada Butte. 

Fajada Butte rises up out of the Chacra Mesa about a mile south of the Una Vida great house. 

Near the top of the butte is an archaeoastronomical feature known as the "Sun Dagger". The Anasazi carved a spiral there on a rock face on which shafts of sunlight appear at midday to mark the solstices and equinoxes.

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A Walk In The Park

Some clouds and a light rain has provided us with respite from too-early Summer weather.  I  loaded a roll of Kentmere 400 in the pinhole camera and took a stroll through near-by Tiguex Park.

Alternate Realities

The practice of photography often emphasizes maximum control of every vairable.  Pinhole photography on the other hand offers the possibility of relinquishing control to some extent to venture into exploring the unknown and unexpected.

While one has awareness of an ultra wide view and a near- infinite depth of field, exactly how those will be expressed in the captured image is hard to accurately foresee.  I frequently mount my pinhole camera on a small tabletop tripod because I like the low angle views which that allows.  A side effect of that choice is some guesswork in aim that often results in the inclusion of unanticipated elements.         

While sunlit scenes can be captured by the pinhole in a second or two, a shaded subject typically requires an exposure of eight or ten seconds, and picture making in interiors can require many minutes to completion.  In that length of time people may unexpectedly wander through the field of view, leaving behind ghostly traces of their passage.

Much of the above was part of my experience on a recent stroll through Old Town Albuquerque with my pinhole camera.  The subjects at hand were all very familiar, but the pinhole gave me images of a novel character where my other cameras would likely only have duplicated past experience.

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PS:  I lost two frames from this roll of Kentmere because I could not see the dim frame numerals through the ruby window.  So I have poked out the window. I'll report back about the issue after the next roll.

Redo

 I got this Vello 35mm & 120 Film Digitizer for Smartphones from B&H.  It is a lot faster than the old flatbed scanner I used for a long time, and I think it produces scans that are just as good as I got from the flatbed.

I used this outfit recently when I wanted to rescan and rework some old pinhole images.  I thought some previous scans made by just hand holding the iPhone 14 were not bad, but the Vello's film holders and the device's vertical and horizontal adjustability makes the process easier and more precise.

 

I used GIMP for photo editing of these pictures.  It has most of the same tools as Photoshop and it is free to downlaod.  There are apps which allow image adjustments on the iPhone, but I am more comfortable just importing the negatives to the photo editor and doing the inversion to positive and other adjustments there.

Perspective

Much of the appeal of pinhole images for me resides in the great depth of field afforded by the small aperture of the pinhole.  The novelty of the images thus produced is due to the fact that our eyes do not have the capacity to maintain sharp focus fron inches to miles in a single glance.  Images of that character can be produced by sophisticated lens design and at great expense, but the direct simplicity of the pinhole yields unassailable authenticity.

Pinhole Day & Beyond

On Sunday I loaded my pinhole camera with Kentmere 100 and went to the Albuquerque Veteran's Memorial where I met up  with three other New Mexico film photographers.  We got off to a good start with coffee and donuts thanks to Joe Van Cleave.  I managed to. document breakfast,  but the rest of my pictures there did not amount to anything worth sharing.  That was not surprising as I never seem to perform well with the cameras when there are other photographers in the immediate vicinity

As I told Joe,  I was reminded of the Optimist's Creed which I recalled from my childhood:

Since I only used half the film roll at the Veteran's Memorial site I took the camera a few days later to Old Town to finish up the roll, and I had a bit better luck with the pictures.

I usually process Kentmere in PMK Pyro,  but I decided to develop this time with Rodinal at 1:50 dilution.  I thought it turned out pretty well, so I may try the same combination again.

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Joe Van Cleave posted some nice work recently from his falling plate pinhole camera on the 35mmc website. 

A Second Look

About ten years ago I put together a thirty-page book, using Blurb, about pinhole photography.  I ordered a copy for myself to see what the book looked like, and I decided I did not really like the outcome.  So I deleted the project.

Recently, I happened on my copy of the pinhole book in my bookcase.  Looking at it again I decided that  I did like it after all.  However, I felt I had fully satisfied my curiosity about self-publishing with my previous book about box cameras (Out of the Box).  So, rather than producing a hard copy, I decided to see if I could reproduce the pinhole book as a stand-alone page on my blog.

Pinhole Narratives, is now available online.   There is a link to the book in the menu near the top of my Photography & Vintage Film Cameras blog.  Click on that menu item there, or just click the book title in this post.

An advantage of posting the book online is that it can be easily edited and updated.  Some of the text and photos were used over the years in blog posts.  I can see some book sections now which could use a bit of polishing, and I may add some additional illustrations.   I'm sure there are other possible improvements, so comments and suggestions are welcome. 

A Plate Camera Outing

 Out for the dog's morning walk I noticed that the historic Henry Mann house was nicely lit by the low sun.  It occurred to me that it might be a scene well suited to the capacities of my Bentzin Primar plate camera. 

 

Back home I quickly checked the bellows for pinholes and then loaded a roll of Kentmere 400.  I made a couple quick shots of the Mann house. 

 

It seemed too nice a day to stop with just that. so I headed down to Old Town to see what else I might find to finish off the roll of Kentmere.

The Albuquerque Museum was built in 1979, with the design by Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock.

 

 

 

 Old Town's Plaza Vieja and San Felipe de Neri is just a block west of the Museum.

 

 

The entrance to the church is currently adorned with a big white sash honoring the new Pope.

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All the plate cameras were originally designed to accommodate glass plates, film packs, or sheet film in film holders.  Soon after the cameras appeared on the market several companies started making roll-film backs which were a bit more convenient to use than the single-sheet holders.  I have a Rada Rollfilm back for use with the Bentzin Primar.

The Rada back loaded with a roll of 120 film can make eight 9x12cm or sixteen 6x4.5cm images with an adapter frame.  For the full 9x12cm size I use the odd numerals from 1 to 15  on the film's paper backing which are shown in the right-side ruby window

Back in the days when the plate cameras were originally on the market I'm sure the Rada was easy to use.  Today, however, the framing numerals  on roll film backing paper are low contrast and can be very difficult to make out through ruby windows.  Knowing that, I took along a small flashlight to help me properly advance the film.  That, however, turned out to be of little help and I only managed to get six out of the eight possible images on the roll.

Inside, under a lamp, the frame numerals are easily seen.  Outside, however, the characters are obscured by glare on the glass and plastic surfaces, and film advance becomes something of a guessing game.  The problem is further complicated for me by my old eyes which do not quickly adjust to changes in light intensity.  When I visit exhibits in the Museum, for instance, it always takes fifteen to twenty minutes before I can clearly see what is on the walls.

I need a better strategy for advancing film in the Rada.  I have considered just removing the ruby window.  I think that would not result in any light leak problems because the red color really serves no purpose with modern films, and the windowed compartment presses down quite firmly on the backing paper.  I'm reluctant to go to that extreme, however, as I hate the idea of compromising the film back's integrity.

Another possibility might be to use some kind of small hood in conjunction with the flashlight.  Just how exactly that would be configured is something I have yet to work out.

Any suggestions will be welcomed.

Tucson

 We will be in Phoenix at the beginning of February, so I may get down  to this WPHS event in Tucson which I have thought about attending for many years.

I have often made the drive down to Tucson in the past to visit two favorite places there.  My cameras have accompanied me on those occasions to the Pima Air and Space Museum and many of the aircraft pictures I have made there are posted in a Flickr album.

Constellation - pinhole

 I have also enjoyed visits to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona to see the current photo exhibits.  The CCP is the repository for the complete works of many of photography's greats including Ansel Adams.

Visits to Tucson invite the possibility of exploring the Saguaro National Park.

San Felipe de Neri

  A clear and cold morning meant there were few tourists in Old Town.  A good day to visit the church in the Plaza Vieja.

At the Botanic Garden