A Trial Run

What do you get when you test a home-made camera with 17 years expired film that's been stored in a hot attic?
Thankfully better days appear to be ahead.

I expect writing a blog to be a learning experience and lesson one will be that it doesn't pay to plan in advance too rigidly. This post was supposed to be the second part of a series on buying a first 35mm SLR, and was supposed to have appeared some time ago. As I struggled along with that possibly overly ambitious subject on which I may just have too many thoughts, events in my own photographic life, the stuff I really should be writing about as they happen, have been sweeping me along, but as my mind was fixed on making the next post the follow-up to the previous and the aforementioned events were eating up the time I had to complete it... Well, enough of that then. Let's get on with things and let part two appear where it may when I get back to it.

For the past few months I have really been intrigued with the notion of using x-ray film for large format photography. That may sound odd if you've never heard of this before, but when doctors slap those big x-ray sheets up on their vertical light boxes to see where the bone is broken (or whatever) what they are looking at is just an over-sized version of black and white negatives we photographers are used to, that was made on film not that different from the stuff we load into our cameras. The film comes in large sheets, not rolls, but for large format photographers this is nothing new. With a few extra considerations photographers who shoot these super-sized negatives can load and shoot x-ray film just as they do with standard film.

The reason they would do so is simple - cost. It's possible to order 100 sheets of 8x10 x-ray film, the smallest size it comes in, from North American medical supply companies for under $35 US. This breaks down easily enough to 35 cents a sheet, less than I pay per exposure when I'm shooting with my medium format camera. (From discussions I've been in with photographers in the UK it seems they weren't able to find any such cost savings from suppliers there.) Photographers who shoot 8x10 film (and they/re out there my friends) usually expect to pay between $4-7 per exposure when they're using standard film.

However I didn't set down to write about x-ray film, not today anyway, but rather where the notion has lead me. You see one place where x-ray film really seems to shine is when it's used for contact printing. That is making prints by placing the negative in direct contact with the photographic paper to yield prints that are exactly the size of the original negative. I have a 4x5 camera, though it's little used these days due to a wonky shutter and a budget that's been devoted almost entirely to medium format this year, but while an 8x10 sheet of x-ray film can be trimmed nicely into 4 4x5 sheets ($.09/per exposure, less than 35mm film) 4x5 contact prints aren't ideal for hanging on the wall. If I'm going to shoot with contact printing in mind then it would be much better to stick with shooting on the 8x10 sheets as they come. This is especially so as I don't even have an enlarger at this point and chances are the one I get won't handle 4x5 negatives. Also, I've been keenly eyeing up alternative processes, especially carbon transfer printing, which are done exclusively by way of contact printing. So while 4x5 is nice it almost seems to be a waste to put resources into it when 8x10 offers this huge advantage and the cost of x-ray film makes the cost of shooting it more reasonable than I could have hoped.

The ironic thing is that all of this is coming down to why I built another 4x5 camera. It's a big part of what I've been up to since you heard from me last, and here's the result so far:

Ain't it pretty? (You can humour me just a little here.) To see why I did this I should first note that while x-ray film makes shooting 8x10 cheaper, it doesn't make it any cheaper to get a functional 8x10 camera, a significant necessity especially considering the sizable chunk of precision glass that goes out front. It could easily surpass everything I've spent rebuilding my not insubstantial medium format kit over the last year in one go, and this at a time when I'm hoping to re-assure the missus I'll be giving the budget some more breathing room.

This all presumes the usual sort of 8x10 camera - the kind with bellows and tilting movements and a big black cloth thrown over your head while you play Ansel Adams with an upside-down ground glass image.

Ansel using an 8x10 camera

But that's not the only way to make an 8x10 camera. A simple pinhole camera made from a big enough shoebox is an 8x10 camera if you can manage to fit a full sheet of 8x10 enlarging paper in the back. And while the average nine-year-old can often obtain surprisingly good results with a simple project like this, more thoughtfully crafted pinhole cameras can be serious tools. Pinhole photography has an aesthetic all its own. Images often take on a unique haunting quality that many photographers are drawn to.

Here are a few examples from photographers whose work I've enjoyed:
The pinhole images of Paul Mitchell on Flickr
8x10 pinhole images by Jochen Hartmann
The pinhole images of Adrian W on Flickr
(the link is to a particular image, but check out the rest of his gallery featuring many other fine pinhole images.)

I would also be remiss if I did not mention the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day website. One day each year is designated Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (I believe it is the last Sunday in April but don't hold me to that). Photographers are invited to submit pinhole photos made on that day and that day only which are collected into a massive online gallery. (My entry in the 2014 gallery is number 888.)

And so it was that the idea of building an 8x10 pinhole camera presented itself. Now when it comes to building things let's just say I usually manage. The results are usually functional and while they aren't generally hideous to look at neither are they to be admired as examples of high craftsmanship, try though I may. This wouldn't be a first go at a pinhole camera for me either. The first shoots 6x9cm negs on 120 film and while it's functional, I managed to make enough mistakes during its construction to cause me to limit its use to special occasions like WPPD. The experience was enough to make me wary of diving into an 8x10 pinhole camera project with a completely different design without some assurance I wouldn't be tempted to scrap the whole thing and start over rather than work around the mistakes I made along the way. Further, since I'm planning to use standard 8x10 film holders which themselves aren't cheap I hoped to have that assurance before biting the bullet and committing to their purchase.

And so the natural thing to do was build a scaled down proof of concept version first so that hopefully I could make all my mistakes in advance of the real thing. I already own a bevvy of 4x5 film holders so there's the hardest part out of the way. In many ways this is a simpler design than a roll film camera since there is no advance mechanism to worry about there's no need for a shutter that stays closed at all times, only between the time the dark slide is removed to when it is replaced. A decent well made box should do as long as there's some way to keep the film holder in place, and most large format pinhole cameras seem to be just this, but I wanted to introduce a few wrinkles. The first was to make things a bit lighter than a straight box of 3/4" wood, and the second was to allow the front end to be changed out to permit different "focal lengths", or whatever you would properly call that with a pinhole camera since there is no focus per se.

My solution was to build the front end out of fiber-glass and have that attach to a much narrower box in the back where the film was held. This will allow me to build front ends of different depths to act as, in effect, lenses of different focal lengths. Now while fiber-glass weighs much less than 3/4" hardwood as you may know it is hardly light tight, so to address that the whole thing was coated front and back with spray on black PlastiDip. The pinhole was made from an aluminium soft drink can using a sewing needle and some super fine sandpaper and its diameter and general roundness were checked by putting it on a flat-bed scanner and using the ruler bar in Photoshop. The film holder is kept in place with a couple of straps that are attached and released at the top with Velcro as seen in this view from the back:

It is here that I made what appears to be the only real mistake during the build, at least so far, by assuming that using this to press the film holder against the wood surface of the camera would be enough to seal out light. The light leaks visible in the photo at the top of this post, especially to the top left, are testament to the fact that I was wrong about this. Thankfully a thin strip of self-adhesive felt all around seems to have addressed this as the test shot currently hung to dry in my office appears to attest. The remaining image flaws you see I attribute to a combination of doing my testing with a box of film I recently found stored in my attic (that gets roaster hot this time of year) with a 1997 expiry date and fiddling too much with the developer formula to try to compensate.

So it would seem at least that everything is on track and working according to plan. Which is good, because I made the commitment and pair of knackered looking but apparently perfectly functional 8x10 film holders are on their way to me now.