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. 

Theory vs Practice

I had a fresh roll of Arista Edu 100, so I decided to shoot it in my Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim and process it semi-stand in RO9 (Rodinal) at 1:100 for an hour.  I thought that should give me good control of contrast and tonality.  Wrong.  The pictures were excessively contrasty and the tendency of the vuws to vignette was emphasized.  Here are the best ones from the roll.

The rest had mostly blown out highlights.  I may have not gotten a fair test for my idea behind semi-stand processing.  I'm down to the dregs on my old bottle of RO9 (Rodinal), so there's no telling if the results would have been better with fresh developer.  

Plate Cameras

My plate cameras are awkward to use compared to just about anything else in my collection.  There is a lot of guesswork in framing an image with either the wire frame or the little reflex finders.  For precise focus and framing you need to mount the camera on a tripod to use the ground glass back, and then switch that out with the film holder to make the exposure.  I don't use the plate cameras with enough regularity to get comfortable with their peculiarities.  Still, I find myself getting around to using them because of the unique character of the images they produce.

The Bentzin Primar is my favorite among my plate cameras because of its compactness and sturdy construction.  The old Compur shutter is simple and reliable.  The uncoated Tessar lens is very sharp, though it tends to flare a bit if brought too close to the sun.

I took the Primar to the botanic garden late in the morning. The Rada film back was loaded with one of my last rolls of Fuji Acros.  The first shot of the figures at the base of the fountain was made in the shade of some big trees with the aperture wide open at f4.5.

I developed the Acros semi-stand in Rodinal at 1:100 dilution for 45 minutes with 30 seconds initial agitation and two inversions after 20 minutes.

I'm going to stick with the Bentzin Primar for a while.  I think I'll use a roll of TMAX 400 for the next session to give myself a better chance of getting the focus and exposure right.

Stand Development

Stand development doesn't necessarily produce better results than many other techniques, but it is certainly simpler and less costly.  These images on Kentmere 100 were stand developed with 5ml of Rodinal in 500ml of distilled water, a 1:100 dilution.  That yields a developer cost of about sixteen cents per roll.  To that you have to add in the cost of fixer, distilled water and shipping charges, but the total per roll is still nearly negligible.

Time and temperature requirements for most processing procedures usually require quite precise control.  Those variables in stand development however are not critical.  In this case, I just used the developing solution at room temperature without recourse to a thermometer.  The developer was poured into the plastic film tank and the timer was set for thirty minutes after thirty seconds of initial agitation.  After that, I did not touch the tank until the buzzer sounded, at which point I agitated the tank for a few seconds and then left everything to sit for another thirty minutes.

Another nice feature of the stand development process is that no allowance need be made for different films or film speeds. It doesn't matter if you are using a slow, fine grained film like Kentmere 100 or something faster like Tri-X.

I have gotten similarly nice results from stand development using HC-110, and the cost is even slightly less as I have been able to use just 4ml of developer in 640ml of water for a dilution of 1:160.

There are a lot of recipes for stand development available on the web which advise small differences in total time and dilutions, but it seems the results are little different.  A good overview of the process is given at the hjlphotos site.

Goodbye to Old Friends

Not these two.  They're in good shape and sticking around.

Those were the only shots I liked out of a roll of 12 shots from my Brownie Hawkeye Flash box camera.  The rest were shot outdoors in mostly sunny conditions, but they looked underexposed by one to three stops.  That is an unlikely outcome with any box camera loaded with 100-speed film as such conditions should actually result in slight overexposure.  

Here is the problem:

I'm not sure how long that bottle of Rodinal has been sitting in my refrigerator.  It could be six or eight years.  Acros and Rodinal has long been a favorite of mine for medium format work, but it looks like the end of the line for this combination.  Fuji has stopped making Acros.  I still have a few rolls left, but anything left out there is going to be prohibitively priced from here on in, and I'm going to move on.  I could get a replacement bottle of Rodinal easily enough, but I think I'm better off using a couple other developers that I like including PMK Pyro and HC-110, both of which also have good shelf life.

The reason the two portrait negatives were closer to appropriate density is that I braced the camera on a tripod and shot with a cable release with a best-guess exposure in the neighborhood of a quarter second.  So, the modified BHF got the job done well enough.

Once I've used up my last rolls of Acros I'll likely shoot TMAX 100 in my simple cameras most often.  There are plenty of other choices still available, though, so still some room for experimentation.

I find myself also dealing with some other changes in the way I handle film.  I recently refurbished an IMAC by cleaning it up and adding some memory.  The computer has a very nice 21-inch display and it seems about as fast and responsive as my laptops running Windows 7, Window 10 and Linux Mint.  I'm using the IMAC now for most of my on line activity, so that means I only have to turn on my old Windows XP desktop to scan negatives using PhotoShop and SilverFast.  Down the line I'll probably have to look for a scanner and some software compatible with the IMAC.  I'm currently taking a stab at learning to use the free GIMP photo editing program, but it has what seems like a nearly impenetrable user interface.  Such is life, I guess.

Kodak Practice

Cottonwoods in the Rio Grande Bosque


Aspen in the Sandia Mountains


Library Bus Stop


Since my Kodak No.1 Autographic Special is a candidate for making the trip to Chaco Canyon, I thought I ought put in some time with it. One of the hazards of having a large camera collection is not being comfortably familiar with a particular camera for lack of experience. Every old camera has its quirks, and if you don't work with them enough, you find yourself missing shots you should have gotten.

The Tessar lens on the this near-centenarian Kodak is very sharp, and everything works pretty much as it should. Still, one has to know how to properly compensate for the difference between what the viewfinder shows and what gets on the film. It is also important to take into account the limited depth of focus at near distances, and to exercise care in focal distance estimation.

I have a Series-V lens hood and a filter adapter that fits the Special. I have also recently acquired red and yellow filters to use with it. The big 6x9 negatives do a nice job with texture and tonality, and I think the filtration will add some nice darkened tonality to the skies I am likely to encounter as backgrounds to the architectural ruins at Chaco.

Shooting the Clack

If you are looking for the best image quality from a simple camera, the Agfa Clack is a good place to start.









The Clack offers greater control than most other box cameras, and the big 6x9 negatives on 120 roll film can produce great sharpness and tonal depth. One does have to keep the single low shutter speed in mind; any movement of subject or camera will greatly degrade sharpness. The close-up setting greatly extends the camera's versatility, but the point of sharp focus is actually at about two meters. Bearing in mind those limitations, the Clack produces images which always seem to exceed my own expectations.

Some of my earlier results from the Clack can be found on the camera's page of my web site.

snowsuit

This is my first try at stand development. I was pleased that it turned out reasonably well using Tmax 100 in Rodinal at 1:160 for 75 minutes. I've gotten nicer results from 1:50 at the recommended time, however, so I don't know if it is really worth experimenting further with this technique.

air power

f233

I went to the nearby botanical gardens this morning with a newly installed pinhole with a 0.150 mm aperture. That is a little small from my focal length of around 35 mm, but it seems a bit sharper to me than the recommended 0.220 mm aperture. I do need to blacken the back side of the pinhole disk as I got a narrow, arcing flare in a couple frames. The sunny scene exposure at 100 ISO with this f-stop is two seconds.