Large Format Friday: Pinhole Photography with Large Format Film

hey there and welcome to large format friday i'm your host matt mirage and if this is the first time you're stopping by here's a playlist of all of our lff episodes and if you haven't subscribed yet each and every friday there's gonna be something new in the world of large format photography a few weeks ago one of my co-workers brought in a bunch of these really old musty suitcases and they kind of looked like they belonged to uh to somebody's great aunt inside this case something pretty crazy these are some handmade pinhole cameras that's about all i know about them so far but on the inside we can see there are two big old cameras in here i'm going to crack one open and the one that intrigued me the most was the one that had this label on it and that's about as far as i know about it and it's this guy this is an eight by ten inch pinhole which of course is up my alley because i'm into eight by ten but then there's also this crazy thing it's a paint can that's been turned into a pinhole camera my goodness it's kind of manage expectations for the folks at home i have little to no idea about these cameras i've never shot pinhole this large before and we're going to be experimenting with this together so i'm going to move around the camera talk about some things that i see on them some cool features and then we're going to head out in the field test them out and share the results that's going to be kind of what we do today so i'm not as jazzed about the camera because well it's a paint can but this one really looks like it's got some some neat construction features on it and we do have our first label of who made this thing so this was a camera that was made by mr bob gration but this is an 8x10 pinhole camera and as far as diy cameras go this has more build quality than some of the new cameras that are on the market it's got this beautiful wood construction with these little metal kind of cabinetry facets keep things on there it has these awesome little carry handles and at the top it even has this neat little homemade viewfinder so it's just some pieces of pvc and there's a little fisheye magnifier in there to kind of give me a field of view similar to what the what the millimeter or the focal length is on this and interestingly enough i already kind of know what this looks like this is a 120 millimeter pinhole and i already have a lens i've been shooting with for years a lens lens not a pinhole lens this is a 121 millimeter f8 it's one of my favorite well it's the widest lens that i own and it was my first like super wide angle lens and it's still the widest one i have i already kind of have an idea of what 120 looks like but i've never shot with a pinhole this large now i do have some buddies that shoot pinhole upwards of 8 by 10 and even ultra large format size and i've always been intrigued by it because it's sharp but it's not so sharp it's like squinting your eyes right so the way a pinhole works is we're creating a super super tiny opening equivalent to f-stops that can get into the hundreds and what we're doing is we're squeezing those rays of light so all of those different color wave lengths of light are we're trying to force them to converge at the same time so we can't tell that depth the difference so light that's reflecting on something really far in the distance and something really close we can't perceive that difference so everything's sharp and nothing sharp at the same time it's one of the cool things about pinhole let's just go from the front and we'll work our way to the back so this actually has this really cool series like yellow orange filter on here which is awesome uh let's see what other data do i have on here oh my goodness it actually has some math on here this is approximately f 200 that's a huge f number there are bubble levels there's there's this giant bubble level on it so i know when the camera is set level oh good my shop table is level that's good to know we already talked about the carrying handles um it has oh it looks like it has some ways to access the film back so right now there's a piece of foam on the inside here i'm guessing that's to back the holder so that's to kind of set it in and hold it there properly during the exposure but let's see what this looks like inside so there's this little wooden peg that holds the top so that's my top flap i should have a bottom flap here too there we go it's just got a little latch i really can't get over how nicely constructed the wood on this is it looks very very very nice okay so that's open open this oh there's another custom design by bob grash bob you're a craftsman oh nate there's this really thin piece of mdf with some foam on it and that's really well made and then on the inside we can see uh looks like he has inserted there's a tripod insert for horizontal as well as vertical which is a nice little detail and you can see everything is blacked out on the inside and there's some nice lining foam that's actually lined better than the dark room doors i talked about last week just done yeah just empty space just got to keep the dark in that's the biggest thing all right let's get my film back in wow okay so i might have to clean some of the dust out of this there's definitely a lot of dust so it's a .018 wide angle so i'm guessing that's the measurement of the opening this is so cool and honestly i'm not expecting big things because i i don't shoot a lot of pinhole but i just want to see what i can get with this so i did want to do this episode on pinhole cameras mainly so i could discuss the the do's don'ts and some of the common pitfalls when shooting with pinhole cameras one of the most common things that happens when you're shooting with pinhole is you're already severely limited in terms of your exposure right you're forcing a really high f number which means you're probably going to be shooting in adequate lighting like really really bright lighting and that's because a lot of films suffer from reciprocity failure well all films do you just have to hit that certain point reciprocity happens when we give film an inadequate amount of light like too little light this happens with a super super fast shutter speed that's not something we worry about in large format that's with something like really fast focal plane shutters that can achieve thousands of a second reciprocity can happen there but reciprocity usually happens when we don't give it enough light over the course of longer exposures more of your traditional grain emulsions like your alfred hp5 your kodak triax things like that they will suffer reciprocity failure as soon as a half to one second of exposure time as you give that film less and less light you need even more of that lesser amount of light to make the same exposure for what you metered so we can imagine if we magnify our f-stop from something like 64 to 264 i'm gonna really need to account for that reciprocity failure meaning i'm probably going to want to shoot this outside so i recommend if you're getting started with pinhole or even large format in general and you're doing something niche like pinhole use a film that you know or one where the data is out there and it's really commonly available what i'm going to do in this i already have some ilford fp4 loaded up into my film holders so i'm going to take some fp4 it's a pretty decently bright day out today i'm going to shoot a little bit with that and develop it and see what the results are all right i'm just set up in the front yard here just trying to do something simple and set my tripod up the camera itself is super lightweight it's really relieving just how light it is i'm just going to do a little front shot here drop this down i threw an arc swiss plate that i had from my digital camera on here is this complete overkill you betcha but i don't want it going anywhere at the end of the day just using the bubble level up top to find my level that looks pretty good and one of the relieving things about a camera system like this is i don't have to worry about having a loop having a dark cloth i just really kind of go by my finder here yeah i like that so first things first let's meter as if we're shooting our film normally so today i'm using ilford fp4 it's a classic standby really good for contrasty scenes just all around pretty decent it is a traditional grain film so i will have to worry about reciprocity failure but i'm not too concerned with that because i've got the charts all ready for it so i've got my meter i'm actually set to 64 because that's what i like to shoot my fp4 at for the developer i'm using developer wise i like to use pyrocad hd it just makes sure that i don't go crazy on my highlights i don't get anything super blown out i'm getting some direct sun starting to peek out and i'm just poking around looking for some metering so i'll hit the white parts i'll hit the blue parts and i'll hit some of these darker shadows too that'll help me find where i need to be f16 i need about a 15th of a second that's at iso 64. so i need to find it at f 264. i'm just using mrpinhole.com's webpage and he has this little chart of equivalencies so if i find a metered exposure at x i can translate it to an exposure for 264. so i'm gonna find it for f 16 is a 15th of a second and a 15th of a second over to that chart is 17 seconds now that 17 seconds is prior to reciprocity failure and that's really important if it's at 17 seconds and i factor in reciprocity failure i'm going to triple up my time so i'm actually going to leave the camera open for almost an entire minute i'm going to go about 50 seconds and that's going to give me enough to accommodate the lighting you can see i have my photographer's favorite on the front little gaffer tape that's going to be plenty to cover the hole for the duration of this exposure and now let's go see about loading this thing up i'm actually not too sure if i'm just supposed to stick the film holder in or if i'm supposed to take the back all the way off and seat it so for this first time i'm going to take the back completely off i'm going to open up the hinges so i got a holder of fp4 open up my hinges take this out all right so holder number one i'm just gonna set it gently against the foam i'm gonna add this piece of foam right here [Music] i'll latch that up that's actually a pretty good latch system a little bit of tension nothing too crazy lock her down yeah that feels like it's in there i'm i'm actually pretty excited okay so we're gonna time out a 50-second exposure open our dark slide [Music] there we go all right now we're rolling seven six five four three two one pop my gaff back on reinsert the dark slide there we go [Music] i definitely think this is one where i have to undo the hinges each time [Music] so i'm going to put this filter on and then i'm going to go for a three minute exposure and that should be [Applause] should be about the right amount pop open the second one place my holder this time i'm going to do it this side that's probably how it's supposed to go again this is all new to me pop that in pop that in lock it down that's pretty good yeah that feels pretty solid all right now for the hard part three minutes my goodness that's a long time but let's let's do it all right my goodness that's a long exposure all right we're gonna we're gonna call that three [Music] one of the most surprising things about this camera is just how solid this back is the fact that it uses the two pieces of foam i really like that it's in the double hinges this is nice i don't feel at any point that like the holder is going anywhere it feels really really nice and snug in place [Music] so [Music] i don't know if it's because there there's a really precision pinhole going on here but the falloff is really not that bad on a lot of these negatives and they appear to be really really even i did notice one thing about some of the negatives where i was utilizing the series filter attachment it appears the series filter might not be 100 centered over top because the corners of all of my negatives where i use the series filter has just this little like a teeny tiny bit that is clipping it's not the end of the world come on this is pinhole but i really really liked what the scans looked like on my negatives and it may be a combination of things but because i am using a staining developer like pyrocat hd the negatives are really nice and even my highlights are really well controlled there was nothing that was completely blown to smithereens i was able to recover highlight information and overall the images look pretty cool at thumbnail size and even at about 8 by 10 contact print size i really can't tell it's pinhole it's only once i punch in to 50 100 okay yeah now i know it's pinhole for sure but looks pretty cool there's some areas that actually look close to sharp in broad daylight i used two different films the first four shots i used some milford fp4 that i had lying around in some holders and then for the last four shots that i did i loaded up some expired t-max 100 t-max 100 has really good reciprocity failure so it's it doesn't fall off as quickly as the fp4 i was using but still has decent speed and in the pyrocat developer i use i was actually just metering it at 100 instead of at 64 like i was for fp4 so i was getting a smidge more speed out of it and i didn't have to have as long of exposure time even in less light so that's why i ended up going with that and then at the very very end i was like you know what wait a second i'm working with all this flash power for this ra4 reversal process that i'm doing what happens if i stand maybe a foot or two from a 2400 watt second flash head i just pop it right in front of me well i probably should have used all 4 800 watt seconds of flash there's barely anything on these negatives but there is still a little bit of detail and there's some crazy pictures of me blinding myself with some flash at point-blank range flash photography is possible with pinhole but the name of the game here is power you have to have a ton of flash power pumping in to your subject you can do that through repeated pops so you can use a lesser power light and you just keep on flashing and that could be cool for some sequences or tabletop but going to be really hard for people in the shop if you're photographing things that are moving or capable of moving you're going to have to have a whole lot of flash power to freeze that action so i was just having fun with it because i don't see a lot of people using flash with pinhole and now i know why so hopefully this was kind of a fun little romp through a crazy camera that i had never seen or never used prior to today's video the results are pretty cool i'm gonna post the full resolution size up on my flickr page and i'll link to those down below in the description if you have any questions about this pinhole camera or pinhole in general you can drop those comments down below if you have any recommendations for pinhole apps and other things that you like let me know down below for that as well because this is my first foray into pinhole how did i do what'd you think of the results i'm actually pretty excited about it i might be tempted to go out and try a few more things with this pinhole i kind of want to try that crazy reversal process with the pinhole but i know those exposures might be like day-long endeavors because of the really really slow speed of that paper after it's filtered so i'm going to keep playing around with this thanks again for stopping by if you have any long-form questions that are related to this or anything large format you can always feel free to shoot me an email large format questions gmail.com thanks again for stopping by and we'll catch you next time for more lff

Channel: Mat Marrash

Views: 9,604

Rating: 4.9589744 out of 5

Keywords: large format, large format friday, lff, mat marrash, columbus ohio, ohio, midwest, 8x10, 8x10 film, sheet film, black and white, pinhole, pinhole photography, high f-stop, large f-number, long exposure, film, film photography, film is not dead, how to shoot pinhole, ilford, kodak, fp4, fp4+, tmax, tmax 100, iso 125, iso 100, pyrocat hd, staining developer, reciprocity, reciprocity failure, calculating pinhole exposure

Id: vapCsW4Gmlo

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020