Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 2020

Paper negative on Adox MCP 310 RC paper, inverted and flipped in Photoshop

Last Sunday was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Being unable to go out to take photographs as in other years (although carrying around a large format camera, tripod and film holders could arguably be defined as exercise), I did want to mark the day and made four exposures in the garden using the MPP Micro-Technical Mk VIII camera with the 0.3mm pinhole lensboard I'd made for it. As the camera's focus moves the lensboard, the focal length can be changed: in the past I've shot pinhole photographs at a 'normal' angle of view for the 4x5 inch large format; here, I used approximately 100mm for the focal length, moderately wide. At longer focal lengths, exposure times start to get frustratingly long; the four photographs were taken successively over about an hour.

Having been working with paper negatives recently, I thought that I'd shoot a negative and a positive on photographic paper rather than use film or plates as on other years. The negative was shot on Adox MCP 310 RC paper, which I've used for some of the recent paper negatives and which, for variable contrast paper, has a certain amount of latitude. I did flash this to reduce contrast further, and used a light green filter.  I rated the paper at an exposure index of 12, and doubled the exposure time for the filter factor. Shooting on variable contrast paper, green is useful as a minus-magenta filter: the high contrast layer(s) in the paper are sensitive towards magenta. This seems to make sense to me; a similar result could probably be achieved by using a low-number Multigrade filter when shooting. The subject, raspberry canes, were lit with sun coming through the leaves of a tree, so this made for high-contrast subject to begin with. The positive was shot on Harman Direct Positive Paper. This is around ten years old, and the result wasn't as good as I had hoped. I rated this at 6, and flashed the paper. The highlights look overexposed, but the paper hasn't developed anywhere near dark enough. The shadows are all a mid grey, and there's the kind of texture running through it that one sometimes get when backing paper reacts with the emulsion on medium format film. The Harman Direct Positive Paper hasn't been stored with any care since I bought it a decade ago, so this might not be surprising, but I have had good results with other kinds of photographic papers of much older vintages. The image at the top of the post is the inverted paper negative, which worked well enough on its own.

Harman Direct Positive RC paper

Paper negative on Adox MCP 310 RC paper

I developed the paper in Ilford Multigrade paper developer diluted 1+20; the dilution of the developer doesn't seem to affect the contrast that much, but diluting it further than usual does make it easier to control the degree of development as it extends the time, although both papers in this case were left to develop to completion. This may not have helped the Harman Direct Positive Paper, but this doesn't explain the texture. I also shot two sheets of Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic film, one of which was fogged, and developed these at the same time in the same paper developer; the negatives are high contrast, as one might expect. Currently without access to scanning for large format negatives, I made a contact print on Silverprint Solar Print paper - a form of ready-sensitised cyanotype paper, for which the contrast of the negative worked well.

Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic film contact print on Solar Print paper

The Hand Inside the Frame

Earlier this year when invited to participate in the exhibition Pinhole and the Art of Invention, I instinctively wanted to turn the premise on its head (“Pinhole and The Art of Invention celebrates the art of invention and the inventiveness of artists by including photographers who build homemade cameras and mechanisms to serve a specific purpose. These innovative apparatuses will take centre stage…”), and, instead of the camera being the inventive mechanism, I wanted to use that invention as a means of showing a sequence of animated pinhole images. For the exhibition, with the pinhole as a constraint, I wanted to use the most minimal means to create a moving image, which meant using pre-cinematic optical devices that produced a form of animated image, specifically the zoetrope, flip book, and phénakisticope. Although commonly thought of as optical toys, these began as instruments to demonstrate theories around the idea of the persistence of vision. Probably the least well-known, the phénakisticope was invented first, and simultaneously, by Joseph Plateau and Simon von Stampfer in 1832 (called the stroboscope by Stampfer), based on work by Peter Mark Roget and Michael Faraday; the zoetrope (in its definitive form), designed by William Ensign Lincoln, and the flip book, by John Barnes Linnett (under the name kineograph), were both invented in the 1860s.

It struck me as a remarkable coincidence that during the same decade that photography was being invented, a number of scientists were independently investigating visual phenomena that could produce the appearance of motion from a sequence of rapidly changing still images. A primitive form of photographic animation would have been theoretically possible from its very birth - although, with the long exposure times then necessary, this would have had to have been constructed through stop motion. The use of the pinhole rather than a lens was simply a consideration in order to fit the remit of the show, but this necessity, and the long exposures that resulted from the pinhole, did provoke the idea that, given the fact that these optical devices were as old as (and separate to) photography, the ‘instantaneous’ photograph (which would become the individual frames of cinema) was not necessary for animation, that the long exposure times of the mid—nineteenth century, replicated in part by the long exposures of the pinhole, could still have created moving images. Yet the desire to do so appears to have only developed after motion had been analytically broken down by the instantaneous photograph, and the subsequent realisation that it could be recombined into movement.

The subject for the animations needed to be simple and repetitive, easy to comprehend and limited to a very few frames. As a model for animated sequences shot with a pinhole camera, I turned to the very beginnings of the moving image, and, specifically, the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Of course, Muybridge didn’t use a pinhole for any of his work, but to animate his photographs, he made a modified version of the phénakisticope, combined with a magic lantern, to project moving images with what he called the zoöpraxiscope of 1879 (these were generally painted versions, rather than photographic, stretched in order to combat the distortion of the figures caused by the rotation of the disc against the counter-rotation of the viewing slits). I had previously used photographs from Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion when at college, re-animating some sequences, in my ignorance thinking that in this I was doing something unique, ignorant of those who had done same thing before me; I had also made some flip books using photocopies taken from illustrations in Aaron Scharf’s book, Art and Photography (where I also encountered the chronophotography of Marey, although Marey is best known for using multiple exposures on a single plate, and so most of his work does not have the ease of Muybridge’s for appropriation, at least for animation). My interest in Muybridge’s work had been rekindled by the Tate Britain exhibition in 2010, which put the Animal Locomotion in the wider context of his entire career as a photographer.

Drawings after Muybridge, 1996

For the exhibition, I shot sequences based on two plates from Animal Locomotion, ‘Movement of the hand; drawing a circle’, and ‘Movement of the hand; lifting a ball’, both of which were simple, repetitive motions; the first plate was one that I had used in one of the simple animations I had made while at art college twenty-one years ago. In the original plates, Muybridge constructed his sequences from twelve images, shot from in front of the figure, and a second set from the side; to replicate or emulate these twelve shots on a continuous strip of film, with the 6x6 negative size, a roll of medium format film would provide twelve square shots. I shot the images with an MPP large format camera with a 9x12cm rollfilm back, with a mask for 6x6 negatives. I made a 4x5 to 9x12cm plate back adaptor to use this back, which changed the camera’s film plane, but using a pinhole lensboard, focus was not a consideration. The photographs were shot at a focal length of around 50mm, a wide angle at 6x6, useful as it was difficult to calculate exactly what would be in the frame. For the exhibition itself, I displayed the work in the three forms previously mentioned: my initial idea was to make zoetropes to show the sequences, which were made contact prints from the uncut strip of negatives on Kodak High Resolution Aerial Duplicating film; to these I added phénakistocopes, printed from scans, and also flip books made from contact prints on paper. The latter were the most successful for showing the sequences moving; the luminance of the image does have some bearing on how well the effect of animation was perceived, and the pinhole images I had made were not bright or clear enough for both the zoetropes and phénakistocopes. However, the best representation of these image sequences is as animated GIF files - the perfect form for short, repetitive sequences of images: at one point almost a footnote, an anachronous remnant of the early internet, now social media has made the animated GIF the perfect visual form for the easily digestible meme of the social media age.

That my own hand appears in the frame is a coincidental echo of the Moebius film made earlier this year, while the theme of emulation or re-enactment also ties it to the photograph of my hand holding a photograph in Gelsenkirchen as part of my project around Wim Wenders' locations used in his road movies trilogy in the 1970s. With all of these pieces, projecting oneself into the work, as these were all made on film, taking the photographs entirely myself, there was a difficulty of knowing exactly how much of the image was in view or in focus; someone else could have operated the camera, but it was never practical in these cases. The hand inside the frame stands in for the hand of the viewer; in these two other pieces, the camera placed to suggest a subjective viewpoint, while the pinhole animations attempted the ostensible detachment of Muybridge’s work. The invisible surface of the photograph and its ability to render texture in a close-up image provokes a desire for a tactile confirmation - the viewer wanting to touch - and the hand in the frame provides an imaginative access into this depicted realm. This may be a sublimated response, and only really relates to a certain type of photograph, but perhaps the close-up of any near object has this potential, whether the subject is animate or inanimate, one can imagine the feel of the bark of a tree, the worn surface of steps, the side of a face, a wisp of hair, or in the animations, the textures and responsive pressures of the resistance of a graphite pencil against a sheet of paper. Once made, I had the odd realisation that they (my hands) looked like the hand (or more specifically the forearm) of my father, but reminiscent of the experiences of childhood intimacy, bound up with demonstrations of dexterity - the hands of my father as he demonstrated how to do things: drawing, painting, cutting lino or wood, coupled with the idea that my hands are older now than his were when this would have been the case.

Although Muybridge himself does appear in a number of the Animal Locomotion plates, the hands in these sequences are not his. They belong to J. Liberty Tadd, the director of the Industrial School of Art in Philadelphia. One wonders if he introduced the idea of the subject of the hand to Muybridge; certainly, the plate of the hand drawing a circle has overt art historical references, most clearly to the anecdote of Giotto drawing a perfect circle freehand, a feat that Albrecht Dürer repeated two centuries later to demonstrate his parity with the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Its circularity is also ideal for the limitations of the twelve-image sequences that Muybridge was working with. Once animated and looped, the circle is infinitely drawn and erased. In my own re-enactment, I marked out twelve positions around a lightly traced circle where my hand would rest for each minute-long exposure, and in doing so made explicit an analogy to the clock, both in the motion and duration of the twelve images. The 'Movement of the hand; lifting a ball' has less immediate associations, although perhaps the clock of the previous plate has now become a globe; these exposures were two minutes long each, and with my hand unsupported for most of the shots, this time duration is more evident in the final pinhole photographs.

The two plates that I drew on for the exhibition were part of a larger sequence of five of Tadd; these five plates all appear at the very end of Part Five of Animal Locomotion, being ‘Males and Females (Draped)’. All five plates are titled 'Movement of the hand', with the explanatory suffixes: plate 532 is 'Movement of the hand; drawing a circle', 533, 'clasping hands', 534, 'lifting a ball', 535, 'beating time', and 536, 'hands changing pencil' (Part Six which follows is 'Abnormal Movements’). Having re-enacted the first two plates, it seemed logically necessary to tackle the other three plates, to complete the project outside of the exhibition; two of these, clasping hands and hands changing pencil, lack the visual clarity of the other three, in that the representation of a simple gesture or movement does not naturally form a circular unit; one plate in particular, 'Movement of the Hand; beating time', had a richness to it that merited further consideration. Intriguingly, the plate of 'hands changing pencil', although in itself perhaps the least interesting (it appears almost as if it is a preparation for the drawing of the circle - although it is in fact a different tool), in  J. Liberty Tadd’s obituary from the American Art News, in its short paragraph, among other achievements, it mentions a demonstration of ‘ambidextral drawing’ to the Royal Arts Society of London in 1891, so this plate might acknowledge Tadd’s ambidextrousness. All five plates of the hand demonstrates dextrousness of course: the fine motor skills and opposable thumbs of the human hand. That Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion is in some senses a comparative anatomy, one could infer that evolution might be an implied, unconscious subject.

Plate 535, the 'hand beating time' plate clearly suggests music - and therefore sound. A few of the Animal Locomotion sequences explicitly do suggest the idea of music in mind of the viewer, namely those of figures dancing; less than a decade after Animal Locomotion, under the aegis of Thomas Edison, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson’s ‘Experimental Sound Film’ of late 1894 or early 1895 achieved the feat of recording sound and moving images simultaneously, showing Dickson himself playing the fiddle into a phonograph while two men dance. Sound was present from the very birth of cinema, and all through the silent era (the 'silent era' was of course never silent) there were numerous attempts to record sound simultaneously with the images; although the problems with synchronising playback were not conquered until the development of sound-on-film (the earliest successes with ‘talking pictures’ did in fact use sound-on-disc), amplification was as much an issue as synchronicity. I emulated the positions of Tadd’s hand through this sequence rather than beat time itself, given the long exposures. Was Tadd beating time to a tune in his head - or to music provided by one of Muybridge’s assistants? (It would be too fanciful to suggest that he was beating time to music being played on an Edison phonograph; a few short decades later, silent films would use music on set to create an emotional atmosphere for actors - ‘silent’ film sets were themselves notoriously noisy, and in larger, open studios several different scenes might all be being filmed at the same time). Although there is no possibility of reconstructing a tune, Tadd’s hand appears to be beating in triple-time - not itself surprising given the date of the sequence, but I was struck how strongly the visual rhythm suggests this.

Muybridge and Edison met in 1888. Muybridge’s account of the meeting suggests that they discussed using Edison’s phonograph to accompany his zoopraxiscope, although, with the very short duration of Muybridge’s sequences, logically, the phonograph would have needed to simply produce a short loop of sound if these were to be synchronised; the phonograph’s two minutes of recording time must have seemed vastly expansive to Muybridge. The form of the phonograph - a cylinder with a linear, spiral track - informed Edison and Dickson’s initial approach to moving pictures: a glass cylinder with microscopic frames arranged in a spiral. However, after Muybridge, Edison met Marey in 1889, by which time Marey was working with rolls of film rather than fixed plates. Thus Muybridge’s closed, circular motion in the zoopraxiscope led to an open, cylindrical motion, to the linear motion of a continuous strip of film of (theoretically) unlimited length. This was also a transition from the inflexible glass plate to flexible celluloid film (via some experiments with paper) and a host of other inventors (Janssen, Anschütz, Le Prince, Friese-Greene, Donisthorpe, to name a few), as detailed in Rudolf Arnheim’s ‘The Thoughts that Made the Picture Move’.

Muybridge's photographs were cropped significantly for publication in Animal Locomotion: the frame was imposed retrospectively, and what we see in the neat modernist grids of the published plates is not the whole photograph. The cyanotype contact prints of the photographs that make up the 'Movement of the hand' series show Tadd as a half-length figure, with a hat shading his face against the sun. As with almost all early cinema (and proto-cinema), Muybridge depended on natural light for his sequence images; although the dark, gridded background appears airless, the grid itself was an open screen of twine: in some of the oblique views it's possible to perceive this background as a shallow space beyond the grid that it is possible to enter, not merely the limit of the picture in depth. That the 'Movement of the hand' plates have a unique position in the Animal Locomotion as a whole is emphasised by the fact that these five plates (as “Class 9. Movements of a man's hand”) were available as one of the separate sections when Muybridge reissued Animal Locomotion at the time of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which had a ‘Zoopraxigraphical Hall’ where he lectured; there is some dispute over whether Edison demonstrated his Kinetoscope at the fair or not. The 'Movement of the hand' plates do not appear to have been translated into zoopraxiscope discs for projection, but one particular aspect of the sequences does foreshadow cinema: they are the only plates which could be said to constitute a close-up in the whole project. David Campany describes the close-up, along with montage, as part of the distinguishing grammar of cinema, and, that, “…as Beaumont Newhall noted in 1937, ‘photographs of portions of objects (close-ups) were most uncommon before the moving picture.’” This uncommoness is represented in Muybridge's distinct five plates of the 'Movement of the hand':

The close-up can show us a quality in a gesture of the hand we never noticed before when we saw that hand stroke or strike something, a quality which is often more expressive than any play of the features. The close-up shows your shadow on the wall with which you have lived all your life and which you scarcely knew; it shows the speechless face and fate of the dumb objects that live with you in your room and whose fate is bound up with your own.

Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film

Bibliography

Hans-Christian Adam, Eadweard Muybridge: the Human and Animal Locomotion photographs, Taschen, Köln 2014
Rudolf Arnheim, ‘The Thoughts that Made the Picture Move’, in Film as Art, Faber, London 1958
Béla Balázs, Theory of the film: character and growth of a new art, translated from the Hungarian by Edith Bone, Dover Publications, New York 1970
Philip Brockman, Eadweard Muybridge, Tate, London 2010
David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion Books, London 2008
Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The man who invented the moving picture, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1972
E. J. Marey, Movement, translated by Eric Pritchard, D. Appleton and Co, New York 1895
Eadweard Muybridge, Descriptive Zoopraxography, Lakeside Press, Chicago 1893
Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography, Allen Lane, London 1968
Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Bloomsbury, London 2003
Spencer Sundell, The Pre-History of Sound Cinema, Part 1: Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson
J. Liberty Tadd obituary, American Art News

Pinhole and The Art of Invention

To coincide with this year's Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (on Sunday April 30th), I will be exhibiting in Pinhole and The Art of Invention. Curated by Anthony Carr, and is part of the London Pinhole Festival, an annual photography festival dedicated to pinhole photography. The main London Pinhole Festival exhibition will be held at the Four Corners Gallery. For more info on the festival visit the LPF Facebook event page.

Timelapse Pinhole Camera Mechanism Mark V by Anthony Carr

Pinhole and The Art of Invention celebrates the art of invention and the inventiveness of artists by including photographers who build homemade cameras and mechanisms to serve a specific purpose. These innovative apparatuses will take centre stage and be given the limelight their ingeniousness deserves. Just for a change this exhibition champions the cameras behind the images.

Exhibitors 

Daniel Berrange

Anthony Carr

Andrew Chisholm

Nicholas Middleton

Howard Moiser

Emma Simpson

The exhibition opens to the public on Friday 28th April (6.30-8.30pm). The show continues until Saturday 20th May.
Monty's Gallery is at 45 Exmouth Market London EC1R 4QL (located in the basement of Barber Streisand).

Open 11am-8pm Monday-Friday, 11am-6pm Saturday and 11am-5pm Sunday.

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 2016

Harman Direct Positive Paper

Last weekend, for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, I shot exclusively large format film and paper. Using a pinhole lensboard with my MPP Micro-Technical camera provided more flexibility than the cardboard cameras I'd made two years ago to shoot glass plates, four cameras constructed in two different sizes. In order to shoot more than just four pinhole photographs, I had taken boxes of plates and a changing bag with me to reload the cameras; the limit to using large format was how many 4x5 film holders I had. I made a pinhole using a piece of metal from a drinks can and rotating a needle to pierce it, fitting it behind a home-made lensboard. Measuring the hole by scanning it at maximum resolution gave a measurement of 0.2mm, although as I could only measure this down to one decimal place, it provided a margin of error to all other calculations. At a focal length of 150mm, this provides an aperture of f750. I shot some test photographs with this pinhole to find the resulting images less sharp than anticipated, realising afterwards this was due to the diffraction effect provided by small apertures.

MPP Micro-Technical Mk VI with pinhole lensboard

The website Mr Pinhole has a useful table to help calculate an optimum pinhole size for a given focal length. At 150mm this was given as 0.5mm. Carefully enlarging the pinhole and measuring it a few steps at a time, produced a pinhole of 0.6mm. At 150mm, this would be f250; extending the bellows to 180mm would mean f300, both convenient round numbers. The lensboard could be placed anywhere on the triple extension of the MPP, but short focal lengths would mean a loss of detail due to too wide an f-stop (as well as showing the folding bed in the frame), and long focal lengths a loss of resolution due to diffraction again, as well as increasingly long exposure times. Ideally, one could make a number of pinholes with optimum sizes for a number of focal lengths, but I used one, mostly at a focal length of 150mm, with only a couple of shots at 180mm; it was easier to conceptualise each picture at a 'standard' angle of view as the ground glass couldn't be used.

Ilford FP4 with handwritten date '11/4/78', shot with 180mm focal length

Initially, I had considered only using Harman Direct Positive Paper, but after testing the paper the day before with rather mixed results, I decided to shoot film as well, using the FP4 and Plus-X from the 1970s that I'd shot on the recent Expired Film Day (I did also shoot a handful of glass plates but found these harder than the Direct Positive Paper to get a decent image with the pinhole I had made). The Direct Positive Paper I shot was over five years old, and the developer I used, PQ Universal, was probably as old, if not older, an unopened bottle having been given to me some years ago. I developed the paper in a tank like film rather than in trays, so I wasn't able to inspect the process, but even with developing times around ten minutes, the darkest tones never quite got dark enough. In addition, getting the exposure right with Direct Positive Paper is difficult enough given its high contrast, compounded by rapidly changing lighting conditions in the morning, with broken clouds moving quickly across the sky, as seen in this shot on FP4 with an eight second exposure.

Harman Direct Positive Paper

With relatively long exposures at an aperture around f250 and shooting the paper with an exposure index of 3, a number of shots were complicated by the light changing during the exposure itself: with exposure times in full sun calculated at around 90 seconds, I had a more than one shot when part-way through an exposure, the sun would disappear behind a cloud, and I had to try to re-calculate how much to extend the exposure with the light levels dropping three or four stops, as in the image above, and mostly erred on overexposure, with which the paper very quickly loses all highlight detail.

Harman Direct Positive Paper

Later in the day, conditions became overcast, which made using the Direct Positive Paper easier, not only with more consistent lighting, but also being inherently lower contrast. The images above, and at the top of this post, were taken in such lighting. The Direct Positive Paper does give a reversed image, which might mean avoiding shots with lettering being prominent; I shot the exterior of Doomed Gallery as I had an exhibit in the London Alternative Photography Collective exhibition over the weekend as part of the London Pinhole Festival - glass plate positives of the negatives shot on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day two years ago. I also made another exposure on FP4 film as a comparison. As well as exposures in seconds rather than minutes, using film, even out of date film rated 64 and 25 for the FP4 and Plus-X respectively, both film's latitude and reciprocity failure helped achieve more consistent results.

Ilford FP4 with handwritten date on the box '11/4/78'

Kodak Plus-X, develop date before July 1972

See the whole set of pinhole photographs here.

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 2015

Ilford Special Lantern Plate

Having made four pinhole cameras for last year's Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, it was simple enough to use these again for this year's event on 26th April. I had made the cameras to use glass lantern plates in two different sizes, 8.2x8.2cm and two-inch square plates. Unlike last year, where I had an encounter with security staff in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, this year I just shot the plates at home and while working on my allotment.

For the small cameras, I used Ilford Special Lantern plates, the fastest lantern plates that Ilford manufactured, and the plates that I used were of 'soft' contrast grade; I've used these plates fairly often before, and not just with pinhole photography. The box that the plates I used for this year's Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day had a leaflet inside the box dated to 1966, and in common with other boxes of Special Lantern plates, the emulsion has lasted well. However, I did have problems  with fogging, possibly a light leak as this shows up in the bottom right corner in most of these plates.

Ilford Special Lantern Plate

One feature of the emulsion used for lantern plates is that it is 'ordinary' or blue sensitive. In the still life photograph above, the yellow of the lemons is rendered as dark, if not darker, to their green leaves (this plate was also underexposed). For most of the pinhole photographs taken with the lantern plates, this has little directly observable difference from panchromatic emulsions, but with a high-key local colour, such as with the lemons, it is striking in comparison.

Ilford Special Lantern Plate

For the larger cameras, I used Kodak L5 Warm Tone plates, having used all my Ilford plates in the 8.2cm size. I'd shot a test plate from the box last year, so I anticipated the results. The Kodak emulsion has suffered more from age in comparison to the Ilford plates, and appears higher in contrast. The plates were all tray developed by inspection under a red safelight in RO9 One Shot, diluted 1:120.

Kodak L5 Warm Tone Lantern Plate

Kodak L5 Warm Tone Lantern Plate

See the whole set of photographs here.
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day website.

Talking about pinhole photography with security guards in the park

Ilford 8.2cm Special Lantern Plate, 10 minute exposure

Two days ago, 27th April, was 'Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day'. In the past this particular day in the photographer's calendar has been one that I haven't observed, and it's been an odd lacuna that, in all the formats and techniques I've used, I've not made a pinhole camera before. This seemed a good occasion to fill that gap. After my recent work with vintage glass plates, I naturally wanted to use them for the pinhole day. In considering what form the cameras would take, I decided to make them square, and to use some lantern plates I had which I hadn't previously shot. Prior to, and then concurrent with transparency film, lantern plates were used to make glass slides for projection and typically would be made by contact or with an enlarger. Before the pinhole day, I tested two types of 8.2cm square lantern plates for exposure, Ilford Special Lantern plates and Kodak L5 Warm Tone Lantern plates. I shot these with the MPP Micro-Technical camera in adaptors made as detailed in a previous post, using a starting exposure index of 5, thinking that the lantern plates might have an emulsion sensitivity similar to photographic paper, and took three successive exposures by progressively withdrawing the darkslide, effectively giving exposures (from right to left) at 5, 2.5, 1.2 to seen how much sensitivity the plates may have lost with age. The Ilford plate box had a leaflet inside dated to November 1965.

Ilford Special Lantern plate test, scan from contact print on Kentmere VC Select paper

The Ilford plates provided better results, with less fog and less silvering than the Kodak L5 plates.  Ilford's were the fastest lantern plates they manufactured ('Gaslight' and 'Contact' plates were also available), an important factor for the choice of these plates with pinhole cameras, and the Special Lantern plates were also made in three different grades of contrast: 'Soft' 'Normal' and 'Contrasty'; when shooting these as negatives, the 'Soft' contrast grade is still high, which reinforces the suggestion that the lantern plate emulsions were similar to that of photographic paper, which is usually high in contrast when used as a paper negative. The plates for the test were stand developed in R09 One Shot at a dilution of 1:100 for one hour.

I made pinhole cameras in two different sizes, to fit the 8.2cm plates tested, and 2-inch square plates, of the same type. I made the cameras from stiff card and constructed two cameras of each size; when working with glass plates it makes sense to work in pairs, as this is how the plates are packed. The pinholes were made from small squares of metal from aluminium cans, with a pin, not pushed all the way down the shaft, but merely rotating the tip to create as smooth and round a hole as possible. I measured the pinholes by scanning these at high resolution, which came out at either 0.3 or 0.2mm diameter. This measurement could then be used to calculate the f-stop of the pinholes (the f-stop number being focal length divided by aperture diameter). For both large and small cameras I made them with a focal length similar to the width of the plates, which is effectively wide angle, the focal length being less than the diagonal measurement of the image format. On the small cameras, a pinhole diameter of 0.2mm equated to f255; 0.3mm was f170. On the larger cameras these diameters gave f-stops of f400 and f274 respectively. As I wasn't able to measure the pinholes more accurately (to 1/100th of a millimetre for example), these figures were approximations, but having tested the sensitivity of the plates, I had enough information to roughly calculate the exposure times needed. Ideally I would have tested the cameras themselves before the day to see any potential shortcomings, of which there were a few, but I was still making them on the morning of the 27th.

Pinhole Camera for 2-inch plates

To shoot the cameras, I decided not to take a tripod, which meant having to find spots where the cameras could be placed for the long exposures needed, and, intending to shoot more than just four plates, I also took a dark bag, boxes of unexposed plates, and empty boxes to place the plates once shot. I started at Marsh Lane Fields in Leyton, where there was a convenient picnic table, on which I could set up a couple of the cameras for exposures of 15 and 6 minutes (and sit and read the paper while the shutters were open).

Ilford 8.2cm Special Lantern Plate, 15 minute exposure

I then walked on towards the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park where I shot a couple more large plates on a verge sandwiched between Ruckholt Road, a slip road for the A12, the A12 flyover itself and the River Lea. This used to be one of those undesignated left-over spaces (which I have photographed before), but has recently been landscaped to provide a path along the bank into the Olympic Park. There was a sluice gate there which provided a platform to place the pinhole cameras for some more exposures. I also changed plates with the dark bag while there.

Ilford 8.2cm Special Lantern Plate, 10 minute exposure

Entering the Olympic Park, and following the Lea, I found a bench on the other side to sit and position one of the cameras to take the photograph which appears at the top of this post. While I was sitting there reading the paper, a golf buggy drew up with two security guards. I'd have liked to have recorded the encounter which followed, but I shall just describe it as well as I can recall. They said that I had been picked up on the security cameras; I can't remember exactly whether they said I'd been seen taking pictures near the children's playground, or if they just asked had I been taking pictures there. I don't know whether they were simply mistaken, or if this was an invention used to justify questioning me, but the insinuation was made. I hadn't been near the playground, and didn't know where it was at the time (I looked this up when I returned home); I may have been relatively near to it when crossing from one side of the Lea, by the Velopark, to the other, but I certainly wasn't taking any photographs at the time. It didn't seem worth explaining that the pinhole exposures of ten minutes or more would be of no use to what they seemed to be implying. They appeared to accept my denial of taking photos at the playground, but had more questions. I had been seen writing things down, which I had, so I showed them my notebook on which I'd written entries such as "3.54 No. 1 Large - River Lea/10 minutes". They then wanted to see the cameras. I only had the one out that I was taking the picture with, so I curtailed the exposure, which was going to be longer, and they also asked if I was leaving these around the park. I explained I only had four cameras and was keeping them with me. The security guards then asked what I was taking the pictures for, at which point I couldn't help entering a philosohical frame of mind (for some reason I declined to inform them that it was 'Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day'). I resisted the temptation to say "to see what things look like when they're photographed," circular but honest reasoning. I was asked if the photographs were going to be shared anywhere, and I said 'probably' on Flickr. Then they said I'd also been seen taking photographs on a phone or digital camera. It was only later that I realised what had been seen on the security cameras and not understood was my use of a handheld lightmeter; however I did have my Kiev 30-M in my pocket, and although I hadn't used it inside the park, I did tell them I had a film camera with me. They asked if they could see the photographs. I had to disappoint them by explaining they couldn't see the photographs as these would need to be developed. At this point I could sense that conversation wasn't providing any more avenues for the security guards to go down, and after some small talk about the transformation of the area, during which I kept my views of the Olympics to myself, one of the guards said "I don't have any problems with you taking photographs in the park". They had been polite throughout, and, to be generous, I can see the need for suspicious behaviour or behaviour that is not understood to be investigated. However, the statement or question about the children's playground was insidious and unnecessary. Having satisfied the security guards' questioning, I left the Olympic Park by the nearest exit.

Ilford 8.2cm Special Lantern Plate, 20 minute exposure

I took a few more shots returning along the canal, such as the image above, then finally some shots at home as the light was failing, with exposures well over an hour to compensate.

Ilford 2-inch Special Lantern Plate, 1 hour 20 minute exposure

I stand developed the 8.2cm plates for an hour, using a higher dilution of R09 One Shot, 1:150, to reduce contrast a little more than the earlier tests. Meanwhile, the smaller plates were tray developed by inspection in R09 One Shot 1:120: one of the benefits of using the lantern plates is that they are orthochromatic so can be handled under a red safelight. All but one of the plates used were Special Lantern plates, but I did also shoot a 2-inch Contact Lantern plate, which proved both slower and higher in contrast than the Special Lantern plates: this was tray developed for a considerably longer time than the other plates, but there wasn't sufficient exposure to provide any shadow detail. All the negatives had come out, but there had been some problems, particularly with the small cameras, some of the plates not sitting properly in the slots I'd made to hold them inside the cameras, and some slight light leaks, problems which I might have been able to elimate had I tested the cameras beforehand, but I wasn't disappointed with my first pinhole photographs.

See the whole set of pinhole photographs here.
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day website.