Pinhole Adventure: Portrait experiment with Erika O’Conor

Last Wednesday I met up with Erika O’Conor to do a little experiment photo shoot. With my obsession with my pinhole camera, I’ve been looking for more things to do with it. Lately I’ve wanted to see where you can go with it in regards to portrait photography. As we talked about what kind of shoot we wanted to do, the idea of representing the classical elements (Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water) came up.

Since the pinhole never really gives you a super sharp image (especially if you’re doing 20 second exposures for portraits) I thought the images might lend themselves to giving the subject a bit of a mythical look to them. So the idea was that the subject would kind of represent the “keeper of the element” and we would try for portraits with the subject involved with a particular element. On this day we decided to take a stab at wind and water.

Since this was gonna be a fun experiment day, I decided to shoot with a roll of infrared film and had a 25 red filter on my camera. This is something I’ve started playing around with, and I’m still trying to find the sweet spot. Exposures have to be greatly increased when playing with the red filter, and while you can get pretty close figuring out the exposure, I’m finding that you still need to be able to improvise a bit with exposures. What is definitely clear is I pretty much need to shoot in sunlight.

We also shot at a creek and reservoir, but got there a little too late in the day and had to shoot in shade. I did exposures between 1 minute and 2 minutes 30 seconds and only one shot barely came through (and it was so underexposed that a decent image couldn’t come from it). I shot a couple of shots with my digital while we at the reservoir (the last two images are from that), so you can kind of see what we were doing. I think with a long exposure her slow movement while floating would of given a neat effect to the image, it just needed to be done in sunlight (it wasn’t as dark out as the digital images suggest, they look that way because it’s how I edited them).

The first image above was my favorite from the day, and the one of her standing with arms down next to some rocks came out nice as well (might work ok for representing earth element). I included the image of her holding up the scarf, despite the large white spot on her face, because I wanted to show how neat that effect came out in the long exposure. The  scarf was see through and I feel it helped add a bit of wind element to the image (too bad about that white spot!).

Not sure we accomplished the goal of representing the elements, but I do think we came out with an interesting image. And I definitely came out of it with some ideas on how to move forward with this idea.

Note: Film used was 120 Rollei Infrared 400, shot with the camera set at 6×6. The Pinhole exposures were between six seconds and 20 seconds.

Pinhole Adventure: Infrared Fuel Tanks

Empty fuel tanks from an abandoned gas station in Idalia, CO on July 24th, 2015. Pinhole image shot using Zero 69 camera from Zero Image cameras. Film: Rollei Infrared, ISO 400. A 25 red filter attached to the camera. Exposure was for 4 seconds, shot in bright sunlight (around 10am). I wasn’t thinking about the red filter on the camera, should of at least doubled my exposures (and probably even longer than that), although I still like how this came out. The Film was developed at home using R3 Monobath Developer from New55 Film.

Enjoy.

Pinhole Test Part 2: Trial and Error…and error.

Sorry for the delay, I said I’d have this up on Friday, but here is part two.

Decided to start playing again with film. I had a few rolls of Ilford 120 film laying around, that had expired a few years ago, but thought I’d play around with them and see what (if anything) came out. I decided to shoot most of the rolls with a pinhole camera my brother gave me a few years ago. It’s a pretty fancy pants camera, from Zero Image.

Queen Anne Library, Seattle WA. An overcast day, exposure was for about six seconds.

Historic Queen Anne Ave, Seattle WA. Exposure for about 8 seconds.

Parsons Garden, in Seattle WA. Exposure of about 10 seconds.

Washington Park, exposure for about 3 seconds.

Washington Park, exposure for about 3 seconds.

The film I was shooting with expired around 2006, and wasn’t stored very well. I had gone completely digital, but never could throw away the film, it just kept moving with me. Earlier this year, I decided I wanted to return to shooting film. For a variety of reasons, I wasn’t enjoying myself with photography and I felt a part of it was that I wasn’t shooting the way I wanted to. It’s nothing against digital, but I’ve never gotten the same feeling shooting with it as I did with film. I also missed how film forced me to prepare and be more present when I was shooting. Again, not digitals fault, but I can easily be persuaded into a lazy work habit. Film punishes you more if you aren’t focused on what you’re doing more, and I love that.

So, I decided to start my adventure back into film by shooting expired film. Smart? Maybe not, but  seemed fun (plus, I can never seem to throw that film away, so might as well use it up!). If I’m not mistaken, expired b&w film tends to produce a denser image, so getting the right exposure can be tricky. As you can see with some of the examples, I was pretty underexposed with the shots, and I think even considering the handicap of the film these would of still been underexposed with regular film.

My challenge with the exposure partly came from the metering I used, and my bad guessing. I no longer have a light meter, so I took a chance on a free meter app for fancy pants phones. The metering app I used is called Pocket Light Meter, and for a free app I think it’s metering is actually pretty good, I just need to get the hang of its look and I can make the little bit of adjustments from its reading in my head. The real problem with using the meter, my pinhole is basically an F/235 (Holy Toledo!), and my only options for the meter were to set it at f/228 or f/256. So, I metered most the shots at f/228, then tried to add a second or two to that. Looks like I need to up the time more significantly than I thought, but hey, that’s why we do test.

Another issue I had, was I wasn’t being aware enough of the focal length of the pinhole. For the first few rolls I didn’t even know what the focal length was, which is very poor work on my part. After looking at the specs of the camera, found out the focal length is 40mm. So, on some shots I need to get much much closer (although for most the shots this was fine).

Another simple mistake, and sometimes accidentally cool mistake, I kept making was overlapping the frames. This gives a slight double exposure on some of the shots, which you can see in the above gallery. In some of my more recent rolls I’ve gotten the hang of consistently stopping the film advancement in the same spot each time. This is both an easy problem to fix and an easy one to keep coming up. You can easily “zone out” when manually advancing the film and forgot what you’re doing, the lesson film constantly teaches, stay focused!

So, these are some of my “failures” with my pinhole so far, but from every mistake comes knowledge. In part three of the pinhole post, I’ll share the images that I felt worked out, some on purpose and some on accident.

 

 

 

 

 

A Quick Thought On My Hopes For This Blog.

Slow exposure of The Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Camera: Nikon D3, Focal Length: 28, Shutter: 13 sec, F-stop: 22, ISO: 250

So I wanted to have a quick post about my hopes and intentions for this site, I’m just gonna write stream of consciousness here, so please forgive any errors. For now, Captioned is essentially a blog for my own photography, but I have hopes for it to eventually grow to something more. I would love to see this site have works from other photographers appearing. I want this site to be a celebration of photography, both artistic and journalistic (and sometimes both at once). Before I get hunting for other photographers to post though, I’m looking to get myself into the groove of posting regularly on here and find my voice online.

The point of calling this site Captioned, is that every photo or series of images should have a story or conversation to go along with it. I want this site to be more than just simple post of pretty images, but images and stories to hopefully educate or inspire. I have a preferaence towards black and white photography, for a veriety of reasons, but I’m not sure if the site will be strictly b&w or if I’ll give it a wider structure. Time will sort out the details here.

I have dreams of someday offering a print magazine edition, which would be different from the site. The print would be more focused, having every issue have a theme to tie all the content together, Captioned: (insert theme). But that’s something not really worth bringing up yet.

For now, you’re stuck with just me. My plan for now is to stick to a schedule of posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’m going to try and make Monday post all about nature. Wednesday’s post will try to be geared toward history, but I imagine this day will be my most flexible day as far as type of post. Friday will be “artsy” day, with hopefully the day filled with a new Photo Tales post. Take a look at what the Photo Tales project is, and if you’d like to participate let me know, that project would be the best way for now to have others join in. For now I won’t make a plan to post on Tuesday or Thursday, but will use those days for the occasional random post (like this one).

Well, I might to write a little paragraph and now I’ve rambled on, I think I’ll leave the conversation here and pick it up again later. Have a great day, and keep on shooting.

Enjoy,

Tom Wright

Momentum

Night shot in Joshua Tree National Park on October 26, 2010. I wasn’t far enough from city lights to get a completely dark sky but I like how it came out. Shot with my Nikon D3, exposure was around 30 minutes, f-stop 3.2, ISO 100, and using my 28-105mm lens.

As I started to put this post together I intended to do a quick rant about my frustrations with how photography is going for me, but it quickly proved to be a bigger conversation for me than just doing a few sentences. So, I’m gonna save that one as a draft and work on it when I have more time to sit and think. The quick version of what inspired me to want to talk about that, I was frustrated with how little I post to this page. I had hoped to post at least three days a week with a photo or series of photos to be accompanied by a decent size essay below (500 words or more type). But lately I spend so much time hunting jobs for things I don’t really find interesting to share here, or I’m so busy/too tired to put together a long post here when I have something interesting.

So to jump start things for me, I’m gonna ease up on the expectations for every post. I’m going to help myself build momentum by just trying to post a photo of mine I find interesting as often as possible (no more than once a day). Sometimes there might be a long conversation to go along with the image, and other times (probably most the time) there will just be an image with a simple caption attached.

I want this page to have better focus. I’m a jump in and just do it type of guy, so, for me to get this thing more focused I just need to start posting. Slowly, a rhythm will start to develop.