More pinhole
238 words, 2 images 
Grand Union Restaurant - (Flickr user ukslim).
My experiments with the pinhole camera adapted from a 35mm camera made me want to try an even more back-to-basics camera.
So, I made a pinhole camera out of a square tin some CDRs came in.
To avoid investing in an enlarger, I decided to expose onto photographic paper. I could turn the negatives produced into positives images by scanning them and manipulating them in software.
It turns out that one of the few darkroom suppliers left in the country, is in Warwick, so popped over to Nova Darkroom this lunchtime to get all the stuff I needed to develop these prints: trays, tongs, chemicals, paper.
When I finished work and got to playing with them, it turned out that I had two sorts of developer and no fixer — so I’ll have to go back and swap them — but it turns out that as long as you don’t mind your prints deteriorating over time, fixer isn’t required.
It took a few attempts, shooting the scene through the window, but eventually I made a 10 minute exposure which came out looking just about correctly exposed. As you can see, I need to practice the development aspect a bit so that the chemicals work evenly.
The wide angle is delightful. My subsequent shot was over exposed, which was sort of fixable in software.
The depth of field, though, is terrific. I’m looking forward to doing some more of this.
May 8th, 2006 at 13:38
That looks great. I tried pinhole photography at school, which didn’t really work too well because the lid of my box camera caved in. I’m inspired to try again some time now that I’ve seen your results though. I’ve done quite a bit of darkroom stuff in the past - prints that don’t use sufficient fixer can deteriorate pretty quickly (months/years rather than minutes though), but if your goal is to just scan them, I suppose that doesn’t matter much. Did you use a local darkroom? I’ve never been confident I could get any room in my house dark enough to do the job.
May 8th, 2006 at 13:48
Our en-suite bathroom has no window. To block out any remaining light, I turn off the ventilation fan and tape a piece of cardboard over it. I’ve knocked two small nails into the top of the door frame, and hang the duvet from the bed over the door to prevent any light getting through the cracks. It seems to work pretty well.
Getting the room prepared and tidying up afterwards is a bit of a rigmarole, but probably no more so than traipsing to someone else’s building, booking time etc.