Feeding and use of the Pinhole Lab Camera

June 2019. When my university retiree account disappeared with a new change in policy, the pictures I uploaded to this blog while logged into that account disappeared. I'm working on fixing that but it's going to be at least a summer long project. 

One of the basic concepts of the Pinhole Lab Camera is that the negatives are even divisions of the most common photographic paper, 8x10 inches.  That also means you have to cut the paper - accurately - under safelight.

Original description link    Construction post link    Link to Templates

A paper cutter is a common thing to find in a darkroom, but not always, and it's a bit of an expensive thing to get. I cut paper by putting stripes of light colored tape on a cheap cutting mat at the distances from the edge I want to make cuts, in this case 2½, 4, and 6 inches, and cutting with a steel rule and a craft knife. Your risk management officer wants me to remind you that this could be dangerous. Put the knife inside some kind of box with a white interior so it doesn't roll around and you can see it under safelight. If you haven't done this much before, practice a little outside the darkroom. Safelights can be pretty dim so wait till you're dark adapted and make sure you can actually see what you're doing. Put the cut pieces of paper in a light tight container.

I may have given the impression with the slots and ridges that you just have to place the paper in, close the camera and it'll stay put. A moving camera gets jostled about quite a bit, and if the paper doesn't stay in place - no picture.

The solution, as my young students would tell you, is more tape.  Wrap a loop with the adhesive side out, and place it in the middle of the paper.

Then place it and press it down where appropriate for that format and give the camera a little shake to make sure that bit of tape keeps your negative in place.

These bits of tape should be considered consumables. They get misplaced in the darkroom easily and they don't last forever. I don't think they harm the chemistry much if forgotten during development, but you sure wouldn't want to use them with unexposed paper afterward.

For the 2½ inch distance, for both the square and rectangular formats, place the paper down toward the rectangular end of the camera and adhere it to the square side opposite the pinholes.

For the four inch distance, the paper goes in the Back.  The Back is slightly larger than the paper, so try to get it square when you place it there.  You might notice that the paper isn't perfectly flat.  The pinhole doesn't care, and that's all part of the fun, eh pinholers?  If that's a problem, the solution is, of course, more tape.

The curved formats are also attached with tape, again adhered at the center of the paper. Try to get the ends of the curves equal distance from the front of the camera.

I'm going to try to get the template so those ridges are a little closer to where they should be, but I wouldn't trust them to hold the paper in place while transporting the camera if they were the exact right size.

For the curve at the four inch distance, it's a slightly different process.  Again, put the tape in the center of the paper and adhere it down with equal ends of the paper sticking out of the Back.

Then squeeze the sides inward a bit, insert them into the box,  and place the Back of the camera on. (This really does look like I'm feeding it.)

 
Before closing the camera, check that the Pinhole Mount is still under the Pinhole Mount Lock.  If you had some black or red tape, it wouldn't hurt to tape it in place. It has a tendency to get popped out from under the Lock during particularly excitable closing of the shutter and rubbing it to make sure it adheres.

The tape for the shutters should also be considered a consumable, and as noted in the construction post, you should carry spares.

I've recently found a couple rolls of 3M plastic tapes that you might find available: Black Colored Plastic Tape (the people who named that must not have grown up in the South) and Decorator and Repair Tape.  They are lower tack than I remember but these rolls could be 10 years old.  I'm kind of liking them for shutters because the handle flaps tend to lie flat against the camera and out of the way.  The classic, of course, is opaque black photographic tape which is still available in a few brands.  If you want to splurge for this and get noticeably higher quality, you can get 3M #235, which is a truly iconic material, but it's going to cost you as much as all the other materials. n.b. I also found a couple old rolls of electrical tape that wouldn't stick to the cardboard at all.

One problem with using tape as a shutter is it's tendency to pull off fibers from the card stock both damaging the camera and reducing the adhesiveness of the piece of tape.  The solution to this is, of course, more tape.  By placing a layer of your cheap masking tape around the pinhole, you create a surface that is more forgiving of adhering and removing tape. You might even be able to use black duct or gaffers tape for shutters after making this modification if you could tear it accurately in these small pieces.

Viewfinding is done with the aid of our first accessory, a cardboard straight edge.  Because card stock has the tendency to curl, fold a piece the long way and clamp and glue to counteract that.  It's not steel, but if you're careful, you can keep it straight.

The idea is to align the straight edge with the mark you made of the location of the pinhole on the sides of the camera in the front and where the edge of the paper is in the camera at the back.  With some of the formats that's the corner of the box.  For the 2½ x 4 inch format at the 2½ inch distance, as illustrated below, it's the front side of the Light Trap. You could also place marks where the curves intersect the side of the camera.

If you sight down the straight edge so it looks just like a line, you can see where the limits of the image will be.  Previsualizing where you want those edges to be is part of the zen of pinhole thing. I think most photographers have some idea before they put the camera up to their eyeball, but it can be an odd thing for some people. (Pro tip: they're usually not as close as they should be.)

Of course since even the shortest of exposures is going to be fifteen seconds, the camera needs to be supported absolutely motionless.  The iconic place for this is on the ground, but I find it tiresome that this often fills half the frame with a featureless foreground of the pavement of the school parking lot. That rising front pinhole should help a little with that.

The ultimate support is a tripod, and we'll get to that eventually, but the rising and falling front give you a some pointing flexibility if you have a level place to set the camera.

You'd be surprised how many benches, tables, chairs, trees, information kiosks, refuse and recycling bins, planters and walls that are nice and level that you can support a camera on that gets the point of view off the ground. Place the camera right on the edge so you're not just substituting the featureless top of your support for the pavement.

Note you have to hold the camera down when you take the tape off and you're liable to move the camera a bit when you remove your hand.  With long exposures on a cloudy day that's not going to make much difference as long as you don't actually change where it's pointing. For shorter exposures  of fifteen to thirty seconds on sunny day, you can probably hold the camera down with your hand.

The camera is very light and susceptible to being blown away by the wind.  For longer exposures, unless you plan for a place to sit and rest your arm, most people can't keep from involuntarily wiggling and moving the camera if they try to hold it down for more than a minute.  In that case you could find something you had around that you didn't use very often and had a little heft to it that you could set on the Pinhole Lab Camera to hold it down.

Developing paper in Caffenol

When the coordinator of the local ArtsCore initiative and I were discussing the pinhole workshop, it came up in conversation that I was developing film in home-made developer and wasn't that kind of a pinholey thing to do. The idea that the ingredients in Caffenol had about the same danger to the environment that the waste water from your clothes washer and dishes have also seemed to work with the theme of the event: "Nature and her Tales."

As I began to panic about what I was actually going to do, I put the idea aside, but I've sort of caught up, and since I needed to practice shooting with 4x5 single shot cameras with paper negatives anyway, I mixed up a liter and gave it a try. (Don't you love it when I mix metric and imperial units of measure).

An immediate impression as I mixed it was that it sure was dark. I've been inquiring of teachers that I knew had conducted workshops and one thing they all emphasize about the response from the students was the magic of watching the image form in the developer.  That's not going to happen with Caffenol.  It's got 40 grams of instant coffee in it. Compared to that cup of coffee in your hand, that's probably about 2 to 4 times stronger. It is essentially opaque. Maybe if you were introducing pinhole to a group that already had experience in the darkroom, it would be interesting, but I'd hate to take any of the magic away from the experience.

But I already had it mixed when I thought of that, so I went ahead anyway.

I didn't do any specific research about it, but I've read a bit about Caffenol and never heard anyone mention developing paper in it.  I remember some internet discussion about using the same developer for paper and film so I thought it would probably work to some extent, but how long would it take to develop it?  Would it stain the paper (it really doesn't stain film)? Would you rate the paper at the same ISO rating? What kind of grey scale would you get?  The biggest caveat about Caffenol was that it tended to create background fogging on films rated 400 or over. I didn't think that would be an issue with paper.

I was using Arista RC Grade 2 Semi-matte, rated at ISO 5 in the f250 workshop camera.  It was a sunny day, and direct sun seemed like an exposure I could repeat fairly reliably for comparison. I even metered it and it agreed with Mr. Pinhole and my standard chart for paper.  A minute.

Somewhat randomly, I decided to start with 2 minute development.

The first negative looked pretty good, but it struck me when I first looked at it that it was a bit underdeveloped. The blacks looked like they could get darker but, I could get a pretty good scan from it.

The next two negatives seemed a little lighter than I'd like, but I couldn't tell if it was a case of a difference in exposure or something to do with the development.

The fourth picture, I decided to go with what I thought would be a lower contrast subject. It was in the shade so the exposure was a lot longer, but I didn't measure it, I just guessed (based on the standard chart) that it was about three stops lower. After two minutes in the caffenol, I pulled it out of the developer and it looked really thin, and although I tell everyone to wait to judge a negative until you look at it in room light, I decided to see if more development time would bring out more detail, so I left it for another two minutes. The extra development time definitely made a difference. The blacks are blacker, but I thought I was starting to see staining on the unexposed portions.

I still got a pretty good scan out of it

.

I realized that by taking a photograph and developing it and then going back out when the lighting conditions were changing, I wasn't going to get any real comparison.  So I loaded three of the workshop cameras and took three successive shots at the same exposure, and then developed them for 2, 3, and 4 minutes.

The two minute does look a little underdeveloped to me.  The three minute seemed pretty good, and the four minute seemed to have even better shadow detail, but the highlights seemed to getting a bit blocked up.

My best scans of the three.

The first is a little lacking in shadow detail, but despite the differences in the negatives, the last two look pretty good to me. If I was going to do this regularly, I'd probably pick the middle one - three minutes.

So, can you develop paper in Caffenol? Yes. Does it affect the response of the paper? Not really too much. Does it stain the paper?  Yes, a little, and the longer developments showed a little more staining, but it still wasn't too bad, and might have controlled contrast a little.

I'm still not going to use it in the workshop in order to let the participants watch the image form, but it would work.

Workshop test

I get to do a workshop for public school teachers this summer.  Most of the workshops I've done were with elementary and middle school kids.  I've done two with adults.  One was part of a graduate course and a few of the students who were high school science teachers were really mad because I hadn't been told to assign them a grade and I didn't have any criterion for doing that.  The other was a "Faculty College" that was offered during off-semester times for general professional and sometimes just personal development of the faculty and staff.  The group that day was small and really into it, but the weather was extremely dark overcast and rain - over 10 minute exposures.  They got in a few shots anyway. (Later edit: I forgot about two sections of Art Education Students I worked with)

The one this summer is part of a program called Arts Core that emphasizes integration of art objectives anywhere in the curriculum so the teachers could be from K-12 and in any discipline. Should be interesting. I've got a four hour block in the middle of a three day event, which is actually the beginning of a year long experience that includes two more sessions in the fall and spring. They want to include "storytelling" in the workshop.  I can dig that.

The last workshop of any kind I did was in 2006.

Yesterday, I went over to the Art Department darkroom at the University we'll be using  (the last one on campus) which I hadn't seen for ten years. It turned out to be much as I remembered it.  I also had a 10 year old box of about 80 sheets of paper that I wanted to find out if it was fogged or not.  Turned out OK - I couldn't tell the difference between a sheet I developed and one I threw directly into the fixer.

So I made a few test exposures with my old f130 two and a half inch foamcore camera, again, something I haven't done for ten years.

It was a bright sunny day.  I started with a 20 second exposure. I didn't measure it with anything and I just counted so it might have been a little long.

A little overexposed, so I cut the second back to 12 seconds.

Still a little denser than I would like, but that curve in the upper left had corner is kind fun.

When I reloaded and came out for the next one, a bit of haze had come over the sun, so I did 9 seconds.

Just right!