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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

6-month (!) exposure (pinhole camera, OT)

craaaaaaaaaazy
 
jbeale said:
I wouldn't have expected a 6-month exposure to be possible, seems like you'd need impossibly slow film.
Click to expand...

Or stacking NDs? :)

Some really beautiful shots in that PDF.
 
Years ago I worked peripherally for Hiroshi Sugimoto. His series of pinhole camera shots of movie theaters are some of the most evocative using this medium I have seen. They are exposed for exactly the duration of the given film, hence the pure white screen and occasional ghost figures in the audience. Most of the theaters are gone now and these images are all that are left chronicling the golden era of movie houses. He was so kind to give me a print (after packing 3500 of them) one of my few real treasures. The accompanying limited edition book is hard to find but better libraries should have it - very worth looking at.
6980_1232044203.jpg
 
Reading the sites linked above just confused me more!

- One site says "Although there is a piece of black and white photosensitive paper inside the pinhole camera the result will be in colour. " (???)

-All the sites say that the paper does not need to be chemically developed. You simply keep it in a dark place until you can scan it or copy it (which presumably would destroy it from the scanner light).

Weird
 
N_Villers said:
Years ago I worked peripherally for Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Click to expand...

That must have been great, his photos really are quite beautiful. I have always been interested in this technique but have never gotten around to doing it myself.
Those six month exposures are amazing, what kind of film would you use to be able to expose for so long?



Thanks for the great posts.
 
Crazy... there are some sharper ones and some very trippy ones. So crazy. I wonder if there are none from LA due to small tremors moving the camera before the exposure is over.

Is the fish eye look partly due to the lenses people are trying to use? And why is there an eyelid shape to the opening in the cover in so many?

I really liked these, but there are so many

sol22.jpg


sol38.jpg
 
interesting.

i met a guy a couple weeks ago named Ron Moss (sp?) who shoots 500-minute exposures of the night sky with 8x10 film. that kind of real estate makes IMAX look like a postage stamp.

the exposure calculations for this type of thing are intense, and probably require a lot of trial and error.
 
what must suck the most is having to wait so long which really kills you on the trial and error thing :)

Is that angle on the frame from the scanning?
 
I am a bit lazy today, sorry

"Tall beer cans are best, as not only do they take untrimmed 5x7 paper, but they also contain beer!"

ok now I have to read this :D
 
Ok this page has the easiest visual explanation on how to put it together:

http://www.solargraphy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10&Itemid=11

So I guess the eye lid shape is from the hole people made. I wonder if I can make one with a full sheet and a paint bucket. Will the hole need to be bigger?

Anyone know where the ratio of the size of the hole and the size of the sheet needs to be for a 6 month exposure.... if that's even how you calculate it.
 
Colorfast and fade

Colorfast and fade

Brent J. Craig said:
Reading the sites linked above just confused me more!

- One site says "Although there is a piece of black and white photosensitive paper inside the pinhole camera the result will be in colour. " (???)

-All the sites say that the paper does not need to be chemically developed. You simply keep it in a dark place until you can scan it or copy it (which presumably would destroy it from the scanner light).

Weird
Click to expand...

I read about a pre Cibachrome paper for making direct color prints I think, it had yellow, cyan, and magenta dyes in it. The result is a black piece of paper.

But the dyes are not color fast. You would put a 8x10 'Chrome transparency on it and expose it to bright light in a contact print frame, then maybe put the paper into a fade accelerator solution ("developer" of sorts?) and then you get a color print, then maybe you put the paper print into something to make the dyes color fast ("fixer" or sorts?), or something like that. Maybe someone in the UK working with color printing in the 1930's and 40's (?) remembers that product? It was said to be easer than Carbro color printing.

You can use the same idea with a longer exposure and a lens camera, just make the exposure several days long, you get a color positive. You need to keep the paper in the dark because the dyes are not fixed they will fade whenever they are exposed to more light.

I thought of taking photos with construction paper, when you cover walls with it in school and pin a leaf on it for a few weeks you get a photogram of the leaf from the dye in the construction paper fading.

If the paper has two, three or more dyes you get colored images from the fading depending on what wavelength fades the colors, if it is just UV then you will not get much saturation.

With construction paper you could use a f/1.4 lens and it would still take days to get an image.

I did try like 6 hour exposures with cyanotype paper, its a POP paper, you can make it yourself so you can make a 16x20 camera, its easy to do and works well, you just wash the paper with water after exposure to fix the image...

What the links seem to say is that he is making a POP paper negative using black and white photo paper, which would not make a true color image(?) so where is the color getting into the images, maybe just in the post computer CC? You can get some brown and violet tints in POP paper.

There was a way to get color images in black and white film by putting it a bath of mercury to get an interference pattern in the film emulsion, but those colors were faint.
 
Lens behind the pinhole...

Lens behind the pinhole...

USlatin said:
Ok this page has the easiest visual explanation on how to put it together:

http://www.solargraphy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10&Itemid=11

So I guess the eye lid shape is from the hole people made. I wonder if I can make one with a full sheet and a paint bucket. Will the hole need to be bigger?

Anyone know where the ratio of the size of the hole and the size of the sheet needs to be for a 6 month exposure.... if that's even how you calculate it.
Click to expand...

If you put a lens with a focal length a little less than the distance from the pinhole to the paper you will get sharper images, although if the fade is from UV the glass will make the exposure time longer, so you may need a quartz lens.

The paper may have reciprocity failure as the pin hole gets smaller, so the exposure time to f/stop may be non linear, than is the higher the f/stop the exposure time grows in a geometric ratio.

Its best to keep the hole to about f/64 to f/256 for the best sharpness and use a lens with the hole on 8x10 paper, if you make the pin hole very small the sharpness of the image goes down, and if you make the pin hole bigger than 1/1000 the height of the paper you will get a images that are not HD resolution. So you need a lens, unless you use a large piece of paper (like 4 by 6 feet) for f/1000 to f/4000 pin hole and maybe reduce the size later for making smaller copy prints, i.e. shoot a 4x6 foot in the camera and make a 11x14 copy print to get a sharper image from the pin hole camera..
 
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