MEW Photography: June 2015

A pinhole camera is lensless camera. It is a light-tight box (or other light-tight object) with a very fine round hole in one end, and film or photographic paper in the other. Light passes through the hole and image is formed in the camera.

Pinhole cameras can be found in history going back to the 4^th century BC. In the 5^th century Chinese teachers discovered that light travels in straight lines, and a philosopher called Mo Ti recorded an inverted image with a pinhole. It was also found in the 10^th century that eclipses could be recorded without damage to a person’s eyes. In North Africa nomadic tribes who lived in tents made from animal skins found that a pinhole in the tent would show beautiful scenes from outside.

In the 16^th century Leonardo da Vinci also recorded in his notebooks about how “images of illuminated objects pass through a small round hole into a very dark room…you will see on paper all those objects in their natural shapes and colours.” There was a recent television program on Fox about Da Vinci that actually showed Da Vinci using a camera obscura, although the subject matter was not too pleasant.

It was not until men like Daguerre, Niepce, and Hershel came along that the process of photography enabled for images to be fixed, and this led to the development of photography.

Sir David Brewster was an English scientist who was one of the first to make pinhole photographs. It was in his 1850′s book "The Stereoscope" that the word "pin-hole" was first used. Another Englishman Flinders Petrie, an archeologist in the 1880′s, who during his excavations in Egypt took many pinhole photographs that he exhibited in London museums.

Pinhole cameras have infinite depth of field and everything from the closest object to the most distant object is in the same relative focus. Objects at a far distance will be less sharp due to particles in the atmosphere. A pinhole shows a scene just as the eye sees it. Pinhole cameras give a soft focus to images, and tend to show a lot of fall off. With pinhole cameras you don’t have to worry about f-stops etc. You just have to expose the film or photographic paper and you will then reproduce an image.

The film or photographic paper has to be loaded into the pinhole camera in a darkroom. With photographic paper, you can load this in a darkroom with a red light. You can then take your camera, focus on your subject, expose your pinhole camera for the necessary amount of time, and then you proceed to process the film or paper.

Justin Quinnell

Justin Quinnell is a freelance pinhole photographer and part-time lecturer from Bristol in the UK. He did a degree in fine art photography and discovered pinhole some 20 years ago.

He has been employed as the head of a photography department, he currently lectures at universities around the UK, and is the artist in residence at Knowle West Media Centre having distributed 450 solargraph cameras to the community.

He has 2 books published and was ‘pinhole photography consultant’ for the Rachel Weisz (Rachel Weisz’ sister Minnie Weisz is also a well know pinhole photographer) movie – The Brothers Bloom.

http://www.pinholephotography.org/images/Bridge%20view_corr%20sml.jpg

This link shows an image of a 6 month solar graph.

Here are some instructions from Justin on producing a pinhole, taken from his video on his website.

For this you will need an aluminum beer can, 5”x7” light sensitive photographic paper (not digital photographic paper)(this can be ordered online).

You need to take the lid of the can with a can opener (instructions on how to do this safely are on another video). You then need to clean and dry the can.

You need an A4, 210mm piece of thick black card. You need to cut the card to the diameter of the can. You then cut notches down the card and fold over. You cut a “bad circle”. This will eventually give you a light tight cap.

Use “Gaffer” tape, tear it and fold card around the base and tape. Do not tape the card to the can. Put the “badly cut” circle on top and “Gaffer” tape it in place. Don’t just tape straight across, do it at an angle, so as to not use too much tape, but still make light tight. The lid comes off and you now have a light proof can.

Use a pin to make the hole. Push the pin horizontally to make the hole. Push the pin in and then pull it out. The hole will be 1-1 ½ mm. Now to make the light proof shutter. Get some black electrical tape. Cut a piece off and fold it back on itself leaving a little sticky bit. Put the sticky bit over the hole.

Put the light sensitive photographic paper, 5”x7”, not glossy as this reflects causing lines (this can be ordered online). As you are exposing the paper for 6 months you can almost put the paper into the can in normal lighting, not sunlight. Make sure that the gap in the paper is opposite where the pinhole is. Feel for the pinhole. Put the lid on. Now this is light tight.

Light sensitive papers goes dark when light touches it. (JQ puts a reel of electrical tape onto the light sensitive paper to show an example.)

He says that it rather like getting a sun tan, in that it gets darker over 10 minutes, and then he takes the tape off it shows the reels image (or where the reel was placed).

The light etches an image onto the paper in the pinhole.

Seal the camera. Seal the lid with “Gaffer” tape. Make it waterproof. Use the image stabilization, and attach the instruction sheet.

You can make a pinhole out of a camera film pot. For this you make a hole in the camera film pot, use a bit of aluminum from a can, put a small hole in this, (not as big as the previous one).

Removing the camera. When removing the camera there may be condensation, so dry with a hair dryer under darkish lighting.

Then again under darkish lighting put the image onto your flatbed scanner fairly quickly and then simply scan. DON’T PREVIEW the image. Scan at 400-600 DPI in colour. This is because the image at present is a pinky brown and when you invert the image it will become blue, just like the sky.

Once scanned return to the can so the image is safe and in a light tight environment.

You then end up with a negative image that you scanned into the computer.

Digitally edit the image by inverting the image, and adjusting where necessary.

You DO NOT process the image at all. No chemicals are used, which is good for schools etc.

Develop the image and it will go BLACK. Fix the image and it will wash away.

Minnie Weisz

Minnie Weisz is the younger sister of actress Rachel Weisz, but in her own right she is a photographer and curator. She studied at the Royal College of Art, and the London College of Printing.

She has done a series of photographs of rooms in the empty 1854 Great Northern Hotel in London, and she has turned the spaces into giant pinhole cameras.

She is fascinated by north London, and she produced a book and exhibition called Eye Dream. It featured a series of photographs of “romantic, redolent emptiness and dignified decay inside the mid-19^th-century Fish and Coal building”. “The magic moment was at Fish and Coal”, “After I was there for 5 days I realised I was in a camera. I was there, with my camera, in a camera.”

To facilitate this, she has to black out all the windows with paper, and make a pinhole. “You are then inside a camera, with the image of the outside projected in it. You can then see people walking over the ceiling.”

http://minnieweisz.com

Here you will find examples of Minnie Weizs’ pinhole photography.There are many contemporary photographers who use a variety of objects to make pinhole cameras. Kenny Bean has modified a wheelie bin that he then transports around to different parts of Edinburgh and takes images.

http://kennybean.wix.com/kennybean

Kenny Bean shows that you can make a pinhole camera out of literally anything.

For this session we had to print out our negatives with a border, be it white, black or sprocket (film edges).

We needed to put our negative in the negative carrier and line the negative up on the printing easel. We needed to use the printing easel’s markers to make a border. When you do this you will then produce a white border. You then expose your image for the required time (7 second). Once exposed you can then process your print as normal.

Darkroom Black and White Enlarger

Darkroom Easel

You then expose your negative for the required time. Making a test strip is again helpful to decide on the exposure time.

To produce the black border, you need to make a mask so as not to expose your paper to your negative. You will need to take your negative out of the negative carrier, replace the empty negative carrier in the enlarger, and then expose your paper for a minimum of 3 seconds (which you need to set on the timer). Once you have exposed your paper you can then put your negative back in the negative carrier. You then set the timer for the correct exposure for your image. (7 seconds.)

You then process your print as normal.

Producing the sprocket border was a little more complex. Firstly you needed to get a larger negative carrier in order that your sprockets would show. You then placed this in the enlarger.

Film Negative Carrier

Film Sprockets

You need to have a mask for your image and you need to mark on the easel the placement of your negative to produce the sprockets and also your correct focus. You need to make a note of the height the enlarger so that you can put your negative back in place to produce an image that was in focus. Firstly you expose the sprockets with the mask in place, move the enlarger back to its original position, remove the mask and then expose your paper to the negative.

You then process your print as normal.

Copies of my original images will be uploaded when I get my file back.

MEW Photography

Monday 1 June 2015

My Future Blogging...

Darkroom vs Digital Techniques - Pinhole Photography and Camera Obscura

Darkroom vs Digital Techniques - Digital Toning Final Images

Darkroom vs Digital Techniques - Cross-processing using Camera Raw

Darkroom vs Digital Techniques -Black & White Printing with Borders & Frames - White, Black and Sprocket

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