wsp_scott wrote: ↑Fri Apr 04, 2025 6:45 pm
Tell me about your pinhole camera, please.
I assume you are doing your own developing/printing? I've thought about going back to 4x5 film but the weight seems problematic. A pinhole camera seems like it could be a fun complement to a modern digital camera. I'd love to print some B&W photos again.
I do all my own BW film development in my darkroom. My color film is lab developed. I don’t print in the darkroom anymore, I was a decent darkroom printer but 15ish years ago I found a ink printing process called Piezography developed by Jon Cone out of Vermont that uses carbon selenium ink and produces a fidelity in the finished print I could never get printing on silver so I do a hybrid process. I develop all my film and scan it on a system I designed and print digitally with these inks. I highly implore you to try your 4x5 project. Weight can be mitigated, managed and in the end is secondary to what you’d gain in creative growth by using a beautiful view camera.
The pinhole was part of a project I call Wander I did four years ago. I wanted to practice simplicity and disconnection and so took no electronics, no tent, no communications of any kind. It began on Roper’s famous route but quickly diverged into a route of my own making while I was walking. I started at Roads End and ended in Tuolumne with a ride home from my wife that we prearranged. But I also wanted to practice creative uncertainty for after half a lifetime of photographing the landscape and perfecting craft I was growing stale. The pinhole is the most basic of cameras; no lens, no springs, a single aperture and certainly no electricity. It’s a lightproof box with a pinprick size hole on one side. I chose a pinhole with a 6x12cm format that uses 120 film. The format yields a 1:2 ratio and is extremely wide. The camera is made of walnut with a chemically etched pinhole that has a brass slide I move out of the way to make an exposure. It’s handcrafted by the company ONDU(which is going out of business). Here’s a link to the specific camera I chose (
https://ondupinhole.com/products/6x12-rise).
But I leaned even further into this creative unpredictability by also taking long expired film that I had been storing for 17+ years. So half my film stock was new, half was very old. Expired film degrades, especially color negative film, in bizarre ways. In the juniper tree image above you can see color shifts and the films backing paper numbers bleeding through. This was all unknown while photographing. The actual pinhole size gave me an aperture of F/160, a very tiny hole that lets in a minuscule amount of light. In full sun my exposure, for most of my film, was 2 seconds. When the sun was lower than 20 degrees, or I was shooting in shade, or under cloud cover, I estimated my exposure times and counted them out, sometimes minutes long, sometimes I just let it sit open. Letting go indeed.
And so I wandered north for three weeks. Sometimes off trail, sometimes on. The route was secondary to the experience of disconnected creativity and slow solitude, meeting other wanderers on their own journeys and watching the sun creep down the lodgepole each morning. I’d often sit for hours if I found a tree I loved or a precipice to sit over and read my battered copy of Walden I often take up there. This way of walking and this camera forces a slowing down and through the seeming disconnection I become much more connected to self, to the Sierra, and to my art. In the end the pinhole provided what I artistically needed by stripping away the superfluous and when I went back to my Hasselblad I was a better landscape photographer for it.
I’m just about finished with my book that uses this specific walk as a through line to talk about landscape photography and art, discontented wilderness experience, letting go and wandering in the High Sierra. If you want to see the rest of the images and read more about the project, here’s the page on my website about it
https://www.scottmansfield.com/wander
Cheers!
