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.