For National Pi Day
14 March 2010
My latest paper negatives
13 March 2010
Pinhole + Paper Negative + Caffenol C
12 March 2010
I’ve been testing out the “Anyway 35″ Pinhole camera I designed the other day with paper negatives and developing them in instant coffee crystals + washing soda + vitamin C (so-called Caffenol C), which is a heckuva lot cheaper than a photo lab or normal developing chemicals. And the results are pretty/interesting. Next up is an 8×10 paper negative pinhole….
Lessons I learned today
9 March 2010A box from Freestyle Photo came via FedEx today, which meant that the photo fixer I ordered arrived, which meant that I could try to develop the paper negatives I exposed yesterday in the Anyway35 pinhole camera I made. Granted, I have never developed anything in my life and didn’t even know what a paper negative is until a few days ago. But, TGFTW (Thank God For The Web). After a bit a googling and great advice and encouragement from a real photographer, Chris Keeney, I decided to experiment. The Anyway35 Pinhole is designed to take 3.5×3.5″ paper negatives. The first thing I learned is that it’s hard to cut accurately 5×7 photo paper to 3.5×3.5 in a darkroom.
Lesson #1: build template for paper cutting and make it a little bigger than 3.5x.3.5
With untested pinholes and photo papers the science of exposure times and focus and framing is turned into a crap shoot, albeit an educated by trial-and-error crap shoot. So, I set up a shot that would be in sun and shade at the same time and have differently-textured objects at different depths of field. I also did a shot of the same scene after it clouded over.
Lesson #2: 30-40 seconds in afternoon sun; 120 seconds in cloudy; shade exposure time not yet determined, but I’m guessing at least 3 minutes.
Lesson #3: Developing film/prints takes patience and a modicum of precision (unless you what to pass off mistakes as “artsy”); i.e., fix and wash your prints better!
Lesson #3 was learned when I forgot/was too lazy to double check fixing and wash times. I woefully underestimated the length of time and the amount of agitation necessary for fixing and washing. As a result, I got a mess of spots and streaks on my negative.
Lesson #4: Developing paper negatives “Caffenol” (Folger’s instant coffee crystals, Arm & Hammer Washing Soda, Vitamin C, and water) works and it doesn’t smell like “grim death” as one guy put it. Normal developing chemicals smell worse.
I want to do contact prints from the negatives (the positive “prints” you see below were produced by scanning into Photoshop and inverting the image), but need a 15w bulb and some plate glass. I also need to be more careful adhering the photo paper to my camera back, using less adhesive. Sticky gunk was left on the back of the negatives and that’ll mess up a contact print. Patient rubbing got the gunk off (afraid to take Goo Gone to it), but there are better ways,.
Lesson #5: Digital photography is FAR more efficient and instantly gratifying and easier and everything else, but this low-fi alternative process photography is interesting and gratifying in its own alchemical way. I’m not even considering it photography per se; rather, it’s playing with the play of light on material surfaces and with substances to produce images (I guess that’s what “photo-graphy” means…). Of course, Sara has known this for ages with her analog cameras, but to build a camera from scratch and develop the exposure you took with it goes even further. Yeah, I screwed up the developing, but I got some images. It worked — the Christmas gift tin I made a pinhole camera out of and the Folger’s Crystals mixed with Washing Soda and Ascorbic Acid produced images on paper where there had been none:
#1 (35-second exposure in sun and shade):
#2 (120-second exposure in mostly cloudy):
The Anyway 35 Pinhole Camera
7 March 2010
Gakken TLR Camera
6 March 2010
Another cool Tokyo vid
2 March 2010Browsing through Vimeo turned up this pretty neat Tokyo-inspired video:
Rapid Eye Movement from POWSKII on Vimeo.
The iPhone 3GS Box Pinhole Camera
2 March 2010Between writing and reading, I’ve spent the past week building a pinhole camera from an empty iPhone 3GS box. The inspiration struck when I was looking around my study for containers to make a camera from and when I saw the box and opened it, it was decided. Remarkably, the height of the interior perfectly fits a 120 film spool. There are even compartments that fit the spools well (including 35mm canisters). The quality of the box — well, it’s an Apple product, so it goes without saying that it’s slick and sturdy. It’s made of stiff smoothly finished flat black cardboard, with the lid covering the entire height of the inner box, enhancing its light-tightness. The interior dividers are black foam core. One could almost simply poke a pinhole in it and use it as is, but it would be nice to have a film advance (and, in the case of 35mm, rewind) mechanism. And a better-than-electrical-tape shutter mechanism. And a padded, grippy base. And a frame count window. So, I found and bought parts (balsa wood, dowels, dowel plugs, metal shelf holder peg, furniture felt pads, some random rubber collar that was from an opened lamp conversion kit at the hardware store, electrical tape, thin flat black sticky back foam, a red frame count window taken from the third Hawkeye Brownie I have). I gutted part of the interior to accomodate both full-frame 120 and 35mm film. I drilled and scraped out holes for dowels that serve as spool holders, as well as holes for the pinhole and shutter mount and the frame counter window. Designed and cut out of balsa wood a sliding shutter. Painted and sharpied all light spots black. Etc. The result is aesthetically very pleasing — worthy of an iPhone box. The almost-too-recessed pinhole might cause vignetting, but that could turn out to be a very good thing. It’s loaded with Fuji Provia 100F right now, ready for testing. If the weather is better tomorrow I’ll give it a spin. In the meantime you get photos of the camera, not from the camera:
I just need to paint the knob silver and make some masks so that I can shoot normal frame 35mm and maybe 24mmx24mm. As is, it’ll expose 56mmx35mm edge-to-edge, across the sprocket holes. Can’t wait to see what comes out of it.
Chrome Extension of the Day
1 March 2010Yet another cool extension for Chrome: Chromey Calculator. A calculator? What a snore….
But this is not your garden-variety calculator. Sure, you can do your pluses and minuses and times and divides with it, and even your sines and cosines and square roots. What’s cool about Chromey Calc is that it uses the Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine so that you can ask it (kind of like those old automaton fortune teller machines at old-fashioned arcades) for just about any kind of measurement in more-or-less regular English and it gives you the answer. If I type “circumference of earth” I get “24901.47 miles”. If I type “height of eiffel tower” I get “984 feet”. If I type “atomic weight of carbon” I get “12.0107″. If I type “temperature of jupiter” I get “-163 deg F”. If I type “speed of cheetah” I get “30 meters/second”. You get the idea. Very fun and useful. It even does conversions: If I type “5 centimeters equals how many feet” I get “0.164″; If I type “1 dollar = yen” I get “yen 89.25 (Japanese yen) (quoted at current rate)”. Very cool. Even cooler: If I type “The answer to life, the universe, and everything else” I get “42 (according to Douglas Adams’ humorous science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)”. Which is true.
Tokyo/Glow
1 March 2010I’m spamming the universe with the link to this short film because I think it’s absolutely awesome.
