Pinhole Day 2016

It's a darn good thing somebody goes to the trouble of organizing the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. I wrote about the tribulations I experienced during the 2015 WPPD while I was still shaking out some of the bugs involved in using the 8x10 pinhole camera I had built the previous autumn, the details of which you can also find back in the September 2014 archives of this blog. Consisting of a box with a teeny hole at one end, the camera itself wasn't the real issue so much as the here were no real issues with the camera itself on that day so much as dealing with the resulting exposures, namely the contrasty, highly scratch-prone x-ray sheet film employed. I was trying something new so it was the usual case of learning a few lessons and making a few adjustments. The trouble is that with everything else going on in my photographic life I didn't get around to trying out those new adjustments until WPPD 2016 came along and lit a fire under it.

My choice for entry in the WPPD 2016 on line gallery - image #1234 as it happens.

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day itself is an event simply to celebrate photography in arguably its simplest form and to raise awareness of the power and expressive potential of photography done with traditional materials and tools. It's also a great educational opportunity. Grade school children can build pinhole cameras from materials as simple as a shoe box, baking foil and a bit of tape, load it up with a sheet of photographic paper then after making an exposure develop the image using a simple darkroom setup, all in the course of an afternoon. It's science and art all rolled into one. For me though it's simply a reminder that pinhole photography is something I have in my photographic repertoire, or it's supposed to be anyway. I shouldn't need the reminder, but there it is.

While WPPD falls on the last Sunday of every April my day job allows little consideration for weekends, so as had been the case with the previous two WPPD's I participated in I did not have the full day to work with. Just as well perhaps as with two 8x10 film holders to my name I was limited to making four exposures. I had a few locations in mind that weren't too far from where I work so it was a cinch to get it all done on the way home.

Making the exposures was the easy part though. I still had to deal with getting those large finicky x-ray negatives developed. I wrote about my results from last year in Pinhole Day Misadventures so I won't reiterate the issues I ran into here.  This year however I had the hangers and tanks at my disposal so I wasn't expecting negative scratches to be an issue and as it turns it wasn't. My second concern was the excessive contrast I have been getting from x-ray film with standard film developers. Though it can be developed by inspection under red darkroom lighting, the Xtol I used last year resulted in empty shadows despite developing until the highlights were as dense as I dared. My current standard, PMK Pyro, is a compensating developer and would probably give much better results. The 8x10 tanks however require a full 5 litres of solution, and while I probably had enough on hand to mix that much it would have left me short in short supply for other purposes. Having raw ingredients on hand I did a bit of research and decided on a particular Caffenol formula called Delta Micro. Formulated for low speed, high resolution micro films which have similar contrast requirements it seemed right for the job, and what do you know, it actually worked as well as I'd hoped.

Developing by inspection again I found that, unlike the Xtol which brought up a clearly visible image in about 15 seconds, it was several minutes in the Delta Micro before I could see anything happening at all on the film resulting in just a little bit of panic, holding the dripping film hanger up to the safelight to satisfy myself I saw some sort of image forming. Though I didn't time anything it seemed about 10 minutes until they appeared ready to move on to the stop bath. The negatives looked good, displaying a nice range of tones similar to those I expect from standard negatives. The only trouble I , could see were some areas, mostly towards the middle of the image, where they seemed to suffer from a sort of hazy fog. Maybe this was the result of having x-ray film, with its notoriously short shelf life, sitting in film holders for the better part of a year, or maybe it was all that close examination holding the developing negatives up to the safelight. Future experimenting will be needed to sort that one out.

It wasn't horrible but the negatives were denser and lower in contrast in these areas, creating a challenge in the darkroom, especially since I was contact printing which made it a little harder to judge exactly where to burn. For the most part they contact printed well on Ilford MG-IV RC with a #3 contrast filter which was replaced with a #5 filter when burning in those denser areas. The results were okay-ish, but I gave in and did a bit of extra work on the image of the railway tracks in Photoshop after scanning in the contact prints to help even things out a little more. There is still a little of the effect visible in the image below of the graffitied overpass pillars as it occurred to me the fogged area just happened to fall on exactly the right area of the image to resemble a slight mist, though no such mist was actually present.

Each participant can submit only one image each year to the WPPD online gallery. It's not a competition, there are no prizes, images are not judged or ranked in any way and there are not sort of minimum standards to be met other than that images must have been taken on the day of the event with a lensless camera of some sort. I would have been happy with either of the images here, but the perspective and foreground details made the railway bridge shot an easy choice. I filled out the online submission form and uploaded the image. In 2014, the first year I entered, my image came up as #888, and I was pleased it was something so easy to remember. This year I have image #1234. If I'm going to be lucky like that, why can't it be the lottery. (Answer: Because I don't play.)

There may be a few kinks left to iron out but with these results I can see the potential for achieving a unique look that is desireable and can't be matched using standard lenses. Yes I have plenty of other pots on the go, so to speak which I'll no doubt be writing about with equal enthusiasm in the weeks and months to come. Still, there's no shortage of things I hope to do and explore with pinholes, and there's still plenty of x-ray film in the freezer. Hopefully it won't take WPPD 2017 to get me out with it again.

Simple Alchemy

My working supply of Beutler film developer, along with some of the supplies I use to mix it up. I made up the commercialesque labels for fun, printed them out and stuck them on with clear packing tape. 

One of the things that may have received passing mention in previous episodes is that I mix many of my own darkroom chemistry from scratch using raw ingredients. It's a practice I thought not all of you may be familiar with, but even you are it seems a ripe subject to share and perhaps exchange a few thoughts about.

While most of the chemistry used in the darkroom lends itself to the home-brew approach, the majority of attention falls quite naturally on developers for film. While arguably print developers and toners have a greater influence on the look of the final result, you only get one shot at developing the original image on film and the characteristics imparted by the particular concoction you chose for this are indelible. This is of course just as true for commercially available formulae as it is for the DIY variety I'm focusing on here, but mixing your own offers a level of selection and control you can't get by simply choosing from what the market has to offer, not to mention the incomparable amount of latitude it allows for experimentation.

I can't remember what triggered my interest in the alchemy of photochemistry in my younger days, but once I got my hands on a copy of Steve Anchell's "The Darkroom Cookbook" there was no going back. Prior to that my attitude had always been that any developer formula that was offered commercially must have earned that honour by being better than the other possibilities. In reality there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of possible good recipes for making photographic developers in a market that can only profitably produce a fraction of these. The ones that are most commercially viable are often the good compromises, the ones offering a balance of the characteristics most often pegged as desirable - the ability to produce images with fine grain, high sharpness, and maximize the effective film speed. Often excellent and highly useful developers exist on the margins of the photographic market because they are the proprietary formula of a lesser known manufacturer. Anyone who is familiar with Diafine will know what I'm talking about here. Other factors unrelated to desirable image characteristics also come into play - how well does a formula lend itself to the manufacturing process, what are its keeping characteristics on the shelf and so on. The bottom line is that there is a world of photochemistry, interesting worth-while and infinitely explorable photochemistry, lying in wait outside the confines of what is on offer from Kodak, Ilford and their rivals.

Recent results using my current standard combination of Fuji Acros developed in Beutler

So why bother? Fair question. I won't deny for a second that there are prepared commercial film developers out there that are just excellent. I could pick just one of these, say Xtol or HC110, and go on with my photography as before quite contentedly. A few years back when I returned to my analog roots that's exactly what I intended to do. The bottle of HC110 that had seen me through the roll of film I still shot here and there through my digital years was only half used and still going strong after at least fifteen years since I purchased it, and the results left me nothing to complain about really. Why make things complicated.

Such was the enthusiasm with which I returned to film however that it was only a few months before the second half of the bottle began to run dry, bringing to a head the decision as to whether to renew my supply of HC110 and press on as before, or whether some other choice might be more suitable. I found that when it comes to the characteristics I considered most desirable in a developer my thinking had changed over the years. Back then fine grain had been high on the list but grain isn't the enemy it once was. Not that I've gone the other way mind you, I don't intentionally emphasize grain, I just don't consider it a defect. Looking at the kind of work I had been doing I was after a high definition (or acutance) developer with a compensating effect so there would be printable detail in highlight areas (like clouds).

A bit of research allowed me to narrow the field to a few choices. One idea was to go with one of the pyro developers I had experimented with many years ago. This would mean throwing simplicity right out the window however as not only do the potential health hazards of working with pyro require extra precautions, they make it difficult to obtain from the US based suppliers who are often unwilling to ship to Canada, at least at a reasonable rate. There was another intriguing choice I found however, something called Beutler's formula. Though Photographer's Formulary sells this as Neofin Blue (perpetuating an historical error of equating Beutler's formula with another developer formula entirely, but that's a story unto itself), but it's such a simple formula and so much cheaper to whip up myself.

Beutler's formula (aka Beutler's developer or simply Beutler, and often mis-spelled as Buetler) is really just a published recipe. It consists of four ingredients including water (I have no idea where this notion came from that water doesn't count as a chemical.) The other three are Metol, one of the most common developer agents out there, Sodium Sulfite which is cheap and used in just about everything in photochemistry, and Sodium Carbonate which if it isn't sold in the local supermarket as washing soda can easily be made from baking soda. It's a high acutance compensating developer with characteristics I see compared to they pyro developers more often than any other formula that uses conventional agents. It's a one-shot developer, a virtual must for me both for consistency and the simplicity of not having to keep track to know when it's nearing exhaustion. It's prepared in two concentrated parts which are combined and diluted just prior to use, all of which helps ensure maximum shelf life. As a bonus Beutler makes the most of true film speed (which should in no way be confused with pushing film.) So while many photographers find they get better results by shooting a 100 ISO film at 50 when they use a standard developer like D76, they would probably find this unnecessary with Beutler.

To keep a long story from getting even longer, with the last of the old HC110 used up I found myself back in the game of mixing up photochemistry from raw ingredients. This did more than just allow me to use one particular non-commercial formula however. Having those few ingredients and the little electronic scale came in handy in other ways. When I found a few bottles of powdered Vitamin C on clearance at my pharmacists I was easily able to try Caffenol which, I hasten to mention, is interesting for far more than the simple novelty of developing film in instant coffee. And when I found myself wanting to do a few darkroom prints but didn't have any paper developer on hand I was able to make enough to get me using ingredients that were on hand. And there are other benefits to brewing your own photochemicals as well:

• Manufacturers are free to alter the recipe of their developers and other photochemical products without any change to the name or other indicator to let you know the developer you bought today is not the same as the one you had been using even though it was sold under the same name in the same package. Make your own and you'll never be surprised when what had been a favorite developer suddenly isn't the same.
• From a modest inventory of raw chemicals you can often experiment with many different formulae that seem interesting to you.
• You get a better understanding of the characteristics of the chemistry you use, how they're derived and often what tradeoffs may be involved than you ever would by simply choosing from whatever preparations the market offers.
• You can play with the recipes of an existing formula or even come up with your own to suit your needs, even if the need is just curiosity.
• Since you are the manufacturer you are immune from the possibility that a favourite developer will be discontinued.
• It can be a stepping stone into other interesting areas of photography such as alternative processes.

This certainly won't be for everyone, and none of this is to say I am committed solely to the use of home-brewed photochemicals. Even back when I was experimenting with home brewed pyro concoctions for film, my paper developer and most other chemicals were off the shelf preparations and there was always HC110 on hand. More recently the modest supply of Pycrocat HD I got my hands on when I wrote The Road to Pyro last fall came as a kit from Photographer's Formulary. I was able to get it without extravagant shipping charges because B&H had it in stock (if only other US suppliers made shipping to Canada as simple) though in such a small quantity it was hardly the bargain getting the raw chemistry would be. Because pyro fomulae like Pyrocat and PMK are highly diluted for use I could get a near lifetime supply or the raw chemicals for a few hundred dollars shipped, but when my small supply ran out I wasn't ready to pull the trigger on that. Not a problem, another batch of Beutler kept me in business without any interruption. More recently I discovered B&H has larger quantities of prepared PMK Pyro in stock, and again no special shipping restrictions to Canada. The package arrived yesterday. I don't know if it will become my new favourite developer or if it will continue to be as readily available. If not, there's always Beutler, and there always will be.

Success At The Tinker Table

Work continues on the next installment of the "Meet the Beast" series. With the challenge of figuring out the video editing software, combined with holiday events that effectively make this a short week for me however it seems like a good time for a brief interlude to talk about other photographic goings on. I haven't used this forum to discuss large format photography here very often. There's the 8x10 pinhole project which I hope to have more on soon, especially with World Wide Pinhole Photography Day fast approaching. I'd have to go back through the archives however to see if I've ever even mentioned that I do in fact own a 4x5 camera that sports a traditional glass lens.

The optically okay-ish 135mm Wollensak Raptar in its once recalcitrant Rapax shutter, now brought to heel.

Part of the reason is that, interesting and excellent as the format is, I'm not currently equipped to do much with 4x5. Even if I could find a 4x5 enlarger that would fit my budget the darkroom is crowded with a medium format enlarger. Nor do I have the capability of scanning 4x5 without stitching, and even then I have greater ambitions for my negatives than a scan can provide. Even so I'm sure it would have been getting some now an then usage if not for the fact the shutter has been on the fritz for some years now, at least until recently.

The camera itself is a Tower Press Camera, which is actually a re-branded Busch Pressman, itself a less well known competitor to cameras like the Graflex Crown Graphic. The lens I have for it is the 135mm Wollensak Raptar with matching Rapax shutter that in all likelihood was the one that came with the camera when it was purchased new, probably some time in the late 1940's to 50's. When it came into my possession in the mid 90's the shutter was sticky, a common afflictions for leaf shutters of this vintage. Setting it for a half second exposure meant the shutter would stay opened for about a full second and so on. I compensated as best I could and the exposure latitude of the film took care of the rest.

When I dug it out last year from the shelf where it had remained almost completely disused through the starting a family, raising young kids years however the situation had deteriorated. Shutter speeds were now all together unpredictable. Sometimes even at the slower speeds the shutter seemed to open and close after the duration set, while at others it might stay opened two or three or more times as long and occasionally even required a little coaxing to close.

The 4x5 Tower Press camera. I've modified mine to suit my purposes, removing the rangefinder and accessory viewfinder to save weight. For my needs the ground glass is the only thing I'll ever use for framing and focusing. I've made a few other modifications including re-skinning it with a burgundy vinyl I believe was intended for upholstery.

My options? I certainly couldn't try to work around it, especially with the price of 4x5 film. I could send it away to one of the more reputable independent service people who will work on a shutter like this, but even if all it needed was a simple CLA the cost of this, combined with two way shipping (probably international) would have exceeded what the lens is worth. The Raptar optics are okay but they're hardly celebrated or sought out. I'd be better off putting the money towards a newer better lens with a more reliable shutter. With nothing else to loose and armed with a few bookmarked sites and an old PDF of the service manual I managed to scrounge, early last summer I made the fateful decision to give it a go myself.

 Now I'm not a complete putz when it comes to this sort of thing, but nor do I have skills enough to dare taking apart anything I'm counting on ever using again. I rated my chance of success as 50/50 at best. For a long time it looked like I had been too optimistic. Based on what I'd read it seemed my best hope was to douse the timing mechanism with enough lighter fluid to clear out the decades of gunk that was slowing everything down. Complicating things was the foolish decision I made not long after I acquired the camera to remove the useless (at least to me) old style flash sync posts. It hadn't affected the workings of the shutter at the time but the missing parts made the innards of the shutter mechanism hard to match up with what the service manual said I should be seeing and it was done so long ago that I had no hope of filling in the blanks from memory.

Never the less I went through several cycles of seeming to have it working only to assemble it all and find there were still problems. Eventually I reached a point where no matter what I did the best I could accomplish was to get to the point the shutter could be cocked, I could press the release and hear noises as though it had fired properly, but this was accompanied by an actual opening and closing of the shutter blades perhaps one time in ten. A difficulty I confronted each time I made a new attempt to get things put back together right was a particular spring that didn't seem to fit back in the way the service manual suggested. I had no idea if I had it in right or if this was responsible for the persistent problem I was having.

For the next half a year I went through spending a day or two trying to get it working, giving up in frustration then coming back to it a month or two later to give it a fresh go. Then last month a breakthrough. Rather than focus on the problem spring I decided to give the whole mechanism a good once over, discovering in the process a loose part that looked suspiciously like a particular piece of the flash sync assembly that had probably been floating around the housing for the better part of twenty years. Once removed the reassembled shutter again fired. The only problem was that it seemed to be firing at the same speed no matter what I set the dial to. Probably that cussed spring. With luck though it would mean just one more foray into the cog-works. With new determination I resolved to reconcile the positioning of this one last part with the diagram in the service manual. And it was then, right then at what might have been the finish line that the one thing I had been so careful to avoid for months happened. Tensioned and nearly into position an untimely slip of the screwdriver tip caused the spring to do what springs are wont, leaping out of the housing into some nook or crevice unknown.

My tinker table is but a small island of semi-organization cleared away from what is otherwise a junk storage area in the dank basement of our century old house. After an hour\s search I had to reconcile the cost of any further wasted time with the microscopic odds of success. If one were looking for a needle in a haystack they might well give up in frustration with the phrase "Forget it, this is like looking for a tiny hair-thin tension spring on Joe's basement floor."

Time to pack it in then. I had a few little boxes of spare camera parts but I had nothing even close to this spring. It's not like I could make a replacement myself was it? Well... was it? I mean that's crazy. Even if I had that kind of hair-thin springy wire there's no way I could twist it into the right part. But did it have to be that kind of wire? All it did was keep tension on a tab as it moved back and forth perhaps a millimetre. As long as I could fashion a part that did that, who cares if it's like the original part. After months of fiddling with that tiny little spring it took five minutes with needle-nose pliers to twist a paper clip into just the right shape to go where it needed to go and do what it needed to do. After all my doubts about how to position the tiny lost spring there was no doubt my paper-clip spring was in there just right.

The shutter has a few little quirks now. For time exposures it doesn't work on the "B" setting on "T" I have to give it a quick press to open the shutter as it will close if the shutter button isn't immediately released. When cocking the shutter if the speed is set to anything slower than 1/25th I have to give the shutter release a little tweak to make it stay. When the shutter is tripped though it fires at the speed set. I don't know that a shutter speed test would find it's particularly accurate, but there's no obvious lag and I don't imagine there will be any need to compensate any longer. Overall it's working better than it has at any time since I've owned it. Losing that little spring proved to be a lucky break after all.

A Spot Meter's Epitaph

Ah Spot, we hardly knew ye. I had hopes that by the time I sat down to write this it wouldn't be a eulogy for another beloved gadget gone to camera equipment heaven, but alas let's all bow our heads. While I haven't mentioned it previously, about a month ago, on the outing I wrote about in Embracing the Elements, my Pentax Spotmeter V suddenly stopped giving readings, each press of the trigger button resulting in only a small deflection of the needle in the opposite direction of the reading scale. Fresh batteries didn't help and in any case the battery check showed there was power with either the old or new set. When I got home I pulled it appart but after several sessions of poking around looking for loose connections, shaking and blasting canned air to flush out debris that might be shorting connections and spraying with contact cleaner, no dice.

I managed to finish that days shooting by guesstimating exposures based on experience and the readings I had been getting up until the meter gave up the ghost, the resulting negatives appearing no worse for it. Since then I have been operating with my second meter, a Gossen Luna-Lux. While its simple over/under LED indicator is less refined than its more sophisticated Lunasix and Luna-Pro cousins, it's accurate and I can't recall a time when I wasn't able to get good exposures using it. I used it exclusively on the day I wrote about in my previous post and had no exposure issues. In fact on the outing I wrote about in A Follow Up Visit I used no meter at all, relying solely on my experience with the old Sunny 16 Rule, again without any bad exposures. 

But despite all this success without the Pentax, at least in terms of exposure determination, the current situation is something I can only regard as a temporary work-around. Accurate though the Gossen may be, and as handy as its option to switch between incident and reflected metering is, it's not a spot meter. 

Here is where I should pause as I don't want to take my reader's knowledge of metering too much for granted, especially when it comes to something as old-school as using hand-held meters. Briefly then, straight-up reflected metering will be familiar to many as the method used with the built-in metering in cameras, at least before the days of computerized evaluative scene analysis. It simply looks at all the light coming from the scene and gives you the exposure settings that will render it all as an average brightness scene. Adjustments may need to be made for scenes that should appear more or less than average brightness such as a snowy landscape or coal pile. Doing reflective readings with a hand-held meter can be even more challenging since all you can do is point it in the general direction of the scene where readings may be skewed by things that don't appear in the scene as seen through the viewfinder. 

Incident metering allows you to base your exposure on the amount of light it reads falling on to your subject, a simple and brilliant method as there is no need to account for how light or dark the subject itself is. For a guy who does primarily landscape type work however it's usually not possible to go to where my subject is to measure the light, so unless I'm confident the light is exactly the same where I'm standing it may not be possible to get a meaningful reading this way. 

The view through the Pentax Spotmeter V. The circle above the 11
on the exposure scale indicates the area that the meter reads from.

Spot meters are really just very discriminating reflected meters, having their own viewfinders with a smallish circle in the middle that indicates the actual area the meter is measuring. In the case of the Pentax Spotmeter V the area measured roughly equates to what you'd see through the viewfinder of a 35mm camera equipped with a 2400mm lens (something that would probably be more accurately described as a telescope.) Most other hand-held meters I'm aware of are roughly the same. In addition to the hand-held variety however, many more modern cameras include a spot metering option with their built-in meters, which I imagine would include many 35mm SLRs new enough to have autofocus as well as, of course, all but the most basic DSLRs and those rangefinder-like lensless digital jobbies. Whatever the case the ability to measure just a small portion of the scene being photographed allows a photographer to, for example, pick out one small area of the scene with average brightness and base their exposure on this knowing that nothing else in the viewfinder is skewing the readings. Taking it one step further they could also take a few readings from different parts of the scene, say the lightest and the darkest parts, then chose an exposure that ensures both ends of the scale will stay within the films exposure range. Add a few more conceptual details and you have Ansel Adams's famous Zone System. 

I cut my teeth on the Zone System, at least once I started to fall in love with black and white work. Specifically it was the version I learned from The Zone VI Workshop by the late Fred Picker. (The Zone System, for those of you not acquainted, makes use of Roman numerals, so that reads "The Zone Six Workshop.) I don't know if the way I go about things these days still qualifies me as a user of the Zone System. Dedicated practitioners may turn their noses up at the subjective loosey-goosey way I go about determining personal film speed (box speed is usually perfect with the acutance developers I favour) and developing times (start with the Massive Dev Chart recommendation and adjust to taste), I still use it conceptually to determine exposures when shooting however, and so long as I have the other variables controlled it doesn't let me down. And using the Zone System, in practical terms, really demands the use of a spot meter. 

But while a spot meter gets me reliable results, would they be any less reliable if I used other methods? Others may dispute this, but it's always been my experience that, saving for demanding high-contrast situations, with black and white film there is a range of exposures which could be considered equally correct in terms of the final results that can be obtained without heroic measures in the darkroom. It's not hard to hit that range most of the time without any meter at all, virtually always with a simple reflected meter as a sanity check. If you add the fact that its also possible for me to use incident metering in most situations I find myself in, it would be really quite rare for me to get an exposure using a spot meter that wouldn't have been just as good if I'd used something less specialized or even no meter at all. Compared to the number of exposures I lose for other reasons (most commonly cock ups resulting from the odd little quirks three of the four RB67 backs I own have) I might do well to worry more about those things and less about metering. 

Still, as I write these words there's another Pentax Spotmeter V that I found at a decent price on eBay on its way to me. Why bother if I could do just as well without it? I think it comes down to a sense of control. Having absorbed the Zone System zeitgeist I can't help thinking in those terms no matter what I'm shooting with or using to measure light levels. I know, for example, that that rock over there has a certain value relative to those clouds up there regardless of whether I have a spot meter to measure it. Just trusting that it'll all work out in the final image bugs me even if, in the end, I would have set the camera to f/11 at 1/30th of a second in any case. I still enjoy shooting this way, just not as much. I hope that package comes soon.

At long last we've started to hit pay dirt. This is a test exposure from the 8x10 pinhole camera which, although it reveals a few issues mostly related to handling sheets of the x-ray film I used, shows that we're really in business now.

What we're looking at is from a scan of a contact print made on Ilford Multigrade RC paper using a make-shift contact printing frame that consisted of a piece of 11x14 picture frame glass, taped along the edges and laid over a left-over sheet of the black felt used in the build. The long white scratch towards the top middle is actually a scratch in the glass I didn't notice at first or I would have chosen a different piece. The black mark in the lower right corner is a fingerprint. Though I handle the unprocessed film with surgical gloves I was having a time of it getting the exposed sheet out of the film holder that way and taking off the glove seemed less risky than continuing to struggle glove on and risking even more damage.

I knew going in that developing the film would be a challenge. Unlike more conventional film if the surface of the unprocessed emulsion is touched it will be permanently visible in the developed negative. To make matters worse the emulsion is coated on both sides front and back so there's no part that's safe to touch. Further, the emulsion is soft, especially when wet, and scratches (both sides) very easily in the development process. At nearly 1/10th the price of conventional 8x10 film though I'm willing to put up with a few challenges. It even has the advantage of being okay to handle under safelights. Handling film in total darkness has become so instinctive that I found I had to keep reminding myself that it was okay.

The preferred method of processing sheets of x-ray film is to put them in stainless steal hangers and processing in vertical tanks. These are hard to find these days and can be a fairly expensive proposition. The most popular way to process large format film generally is to use trays and develop them in much the same way print on photo paper are processed. With delicate x-ray emulsions however it's a virtual guarantee this will result in scratches, mainly from the ridges found in conventional processing trays. Some x-ray film users get around this by using flat-bottomed trays. The ridges are there for a reason though; it's easy for sheets of paper or film to get stuck to the bottom and with no way to work your fingers underneath you may have a time of it getting them out.

In the various forums where thing like photography using x-ray film is discussed I had heard of another method, processing in zippered freezer bags. A sheet of 8x10 film fits just right in a standard large size freezer bag. You can pour chemicals in, zip the top up and do almost anything you want with the sealed bag. I decided to try this. Unfortunately none of the people who mentioned this method went into much detail about how to implement it.

So began the learning curve. For my test shots I drove down the road to the International Railway Bridge between Fort Erie and Buffalo NY and made two exposures. I actually got three negatives as I had accidentally loaded one side with two sheet stuck together and the film is actually transparent enough that there was an image on the sheet underneath. This method requires processing one sheet at a time and I had three to practice with. I spent the first two (the two that were stacked) to learn that having a separate bag for developer stop and fix was not the way to go. The third image, this one, was processed by putting the film into a dry bag, filling it with developer which I poured out into the developer tray when finished, pouring the stop bath into the same bag and dumping it into the stop tray when finished and so on. After fixing I simply filled the bag with wash water, let it sit a few minutes with a bit of agitation and going through several changes of water like this before hanging to dry. This has the added benefit of washing the interior of the bag. I figure each one should be good for a few sheets of film.

I believe the major weakness with this method is visible in the odd density variation seen towards the lower left. Getting the bag closed after pouring a new liquid in can be a challenge. I got the kind that you can feel teeth meshing to confirm you have a good seal, but it can sometimes take a few tries under dim red lights to get both sides lined up properly and all the while the film is sitting only partially submerged in the chemistry. It also tends to float up and get in the way of closure so the operation is further complicated by the need to hold it down. I think what happened here is that the film was too close to the seal and even though it wasn't in the way of the seal it got pinched up there limiting the flow of developer around it. I found it useful to use only enough chemistry to keep the film easily submerged once the bag was laid on its side - about 500-600 mL. More than this made it harder to close the bag and increased the tendency of the film to float up. With a bit of experience I might be able to get reliable results with this method. If not I'll try something else. With a bit of luck maybe the chance to get my hands on some 8x10 film holders may come along.

A final note, getting back to the camera itself, I have given it one of the updates I talked about before. While making the test shot went fairly smoothly it was evident the camera would benefit from a better plan for the shutter than to literally use my hat so this was priority number one.

The idea of keeping the pinhole covered with a simple magnetic sheet, the kind typically used for refrigerator magnets, is so simple I can't believe I hadn't run across it before. All that's needed is a steel washer surrounding the pinhole opening. I thought I would need to replace the aluminium one I had used before this plan occurred to me, but a serendipitous find in one of my boxes of odds and ends turned up a large convexly curved steel washer that fit right over the existing setup. I epoxied everything in place since I didn't want screw heads jutting above the surface and even the large washer seems too thin to counter-sink. I have a large sheet of this magnetic material with peel away adhesive backing, left over surplus from the old family business, that I used to make the  custom magnet in the above photo, but just about any old fridge magnet would do for this. They have enough hold to keep the pinhole securely covered until everything is ready to make the exposure but not so much to worry about jarring the camera when it is pulled away to start the exposure. To end the exposure simply slap it back in place. What could be simpler?

Nearly There

This blog has only been going a few months so I'd be kidding myself to think anyone out there is waiting with bated breath for my next post, but if anyone's noticed it's been a while since the last one hopefully you've guessed the 8x10 pinhole project I've been writing about has been eating most of my free time. I'm happy to report though that things are nearly finished. There's just a few finishing details to worry about but as things stand now it's ready to begin testing. Here's how things have panned out since last time...

Here is how I solved the problem of attaching the cone portion to the rest of the camera. Those are elastic bands, the short thick ones grocery stores use to bunch vegetables. Standard office supply elastics, and other things I tried such as hair bands, just didn't have enough pull. Inside the cone they are wrapped around mirror hangers which are hard to see here since I painted them black. Inside the camera portion they attach to upholstery tacks I didn't drive in all the way. 

After considering a number of fancier options including leaf springs and rare-earth magnets I settled on these simple latches to keep the film holder in place. I wasn't able to find anything by way of ready-made hardware that was suitable for this, but by luck I had a just-right-sized strip of maple in the off-cuts from making the body which in the end is probably better.

I used the plug from a hole cutter as the disk for the tripod socket and after enlarging the central hole pressed in a threaded insert with a bench vice. It was painted black with the spray on Plasti-Dip I used to make the fiberglass cone on my 4x5 project light proof. It's sort of rubbery and you can see a layer sort of peeling off here from the friction of tightening then removing the the tripod quick release plate.  

Here's what it looks like from the business end. There is no shutter at all at this point and I should actually be able to get away without one. Since the film stays in a light tight (I hope) film holder there's no need to keep light from getting in until the dark slide is ready to be pulled. A hat or a dark card over the pinhole should make a serviceable shutter in the short span between pulling and replacing the dark slide. My concern is that the 8x10 dark slides sometime need a bit of coaxing to slide through their groove in the film holders and I may want two hands available for this. It occurred to me too late that a refrigerator magnet would cover the pinhole opening hands free if only I hadn't made that black retaining ring you see from non-magnetic aluminium. Oh well, should be an easy fix. 

I received a box of 8x10 x-ray film about a week ago, so whenever I get the time I should be able to take it for a few test shots. That's not to say I'm done, but barring light leaks or other unexpected issues it' now a functional camera. Finishing touches I'm planning include:

• Some aesthetic finishing touches, especially around the front "standard"
• Swapping out the retaining ring in the front for one made from a ferric metal to allow for my fridge magnet shutter idea
  (Am I the only one who wonders why there's a 'd' in fridge, but not in refrigerator?)
• Adding a second tripod socket to the short side to allow for verticals
• A detachable viewfinder
• Built in spirit levels

Hopefully I'll have results to show soon. As always I'll keep you posted.

Plugging Along - The 8x10 Pinhole Project.

In the September 4th post I had just gotten underway with a new project to build an 8x10 pinhole camera, having just received the film holders. Since then things have been progressing quite well, at least so far. As you were probably able to surmise if you read the first post I'm not one for starting out with an exact set of blueprints and trying to proceed in accordance with a set plan. I've done things like this enough times to know that along the way the need will probably arise to make allowances for things that didn't quite come out as expected and for new better ideas that only suggest themselves as the thing begins to take shape.Even if I had started with a clear plan it'd have been tossed by now.

The design I had in mind at the outset is based on the design of the 4x5 pinhole camera I made as a warm up project which itself was based on a completely original combination of design ideas I'd stolen from others. Rather than making a straight box my camera designs incorporate a cone out front like the Ilford-Harman Titan models, allowing front ends to be swapped out like lenses while keeping the weight down considerably. This last is particularly important with the 8x10 project as I'd say something the weight of a traditional solid box design would require a heavier tripod than I currently own.

The following sequence of photos should give you an idea of how thing have gone so far.

Here are the trapezoid pieces that form the sides of the cone cut from 1/4" plywood. As I suggested last time I did forego fibreglass construction used with the 4x5 cone. Working with the stuff was just too much hassle. Connecting the pieces to form the sides of the cone was as easy as Gorilla gluing the seams with masking tape to hold the pieces in place until everything was set. You can see the box that forms the main body of the camera in behind by the way. Since the Sept. 4 post they were glued up in a framing clamp and secured with L-brackets just as I'd planned. I may try fancier joinery someday. Maybe.

  

Once it was all a single piece I cut out a cover for it from a sheet of vinyl cloth from the local fabric store. I believe this stuff is intended for upholstery projects, The photo above shows the cloth covering on the back. The front is a burgundy colour. The pattern may seem familiar if you've ever looked into how bellows are made. 

The inside is lined with black felt. Normally of course a coat or two of black paint would do, but my current plans involve using the ends of the cloth to hold the cone to the rest of the camera from the inside, probably with Velcro. It remains to be seen how well this idea will work out, but even if it doesn't fly I have to say the inside seems much blacker than any paint would have rendered it. 

I capped it off with another piece of 1/4" ply covered with a maple veneer to match the maple body. Actually it doesn't seem to match as well as I'd hoped but maybe once everything is finished the difference won't be noticeable. Here at last you can see the burgundy exterior of the vinyl though it's in need of a good clean here. 

Inside the box is a bit of a ledge where it mates to the cone. The pieces are actually the leftover strips from cutting the slot on the back that the film holder slides into. Owing to the fact that I botched one of the sides early in the game, forcing me to cut another, I was left with enough to go all the way around the inside. 

And finally here it how the whole thing looks as of this writing.

To finish it obviously I'll need to add the pinhole. The box will need to be urethaned and painted black inside. Felt strips on the back surfaces that contact the film holder will serve a light seals. I'll need to create some means to secure the cone to the body which, as I said, will probably involve Velcro unless there are unanticipated problems with that. I'll have to add a tripod socket, which can be as easy as putting a t-nut in place but maybe I'll come up with something more elegant. Finally something has to hold the film holder in place on the back and allow it to be released. In the 4x5 version this involved Velcro straps but I'm thinking of changing this up too. Velcro strips seem like an affront the natural wood finish. I'm thinking of adding a vertical bar that can be tightened or loosened with something like thumbscrews or wing nuts. As always I'll keep you posted.