Pinhole Pleasures

 A bit late to the whole pinhole party thing but that seems to be typical for me.   Anyways, I bit the bullet last week and splashed some of my hard-earned (well, once upon a time, anyway) cash on a rather splendidly made Titan Pinhole camera, made by the fantastic Mr Mike Walker in conjunction with Harman (Ilford).  It takes 4x5 sheet film, which is just perfect as I can rattle off one or two sheets at a time.  Mr Walker, by the way, exemplified good customer service...I emailed him a question last Wednesday morning and he replied promptly.  When I said I would be ordering one then and there he said he would delay going to the Post Office until he saw my order come in.  And indeed he must have done, as less than 24 hours later the thing was in my grubby little hands.  It didn't matter that my hands were grubby, by the way, since it's made from injection moulded ABS...I think I read somewhere you could put it in the dishwasher to clean it - although I think I'll pass on that.  

The pinhole has an angle of view of 72 degrees (which I think equates to about 30 degrees wide-angle lens in 35mm space) and an effective aperture of f/208.  The kit includes a ready-reckoner cardboard spin wheel to help you get the exposure, since meters typically don't include an option for such a small aperture.

Coincidentally, on the same day I received some paper from Ilford (thanks to their 10% voucher last weekend), which included the new MG V RC paper, so these shots are printed on that.  More about that paper in a future post.

My first ever pinhole shot...Portstewart Prom, of course (lower deck):

Ilford FP4+ Delta, on MG V RC paper

Impressive considering there's no lens...makes you wonder why we bother, really.  On Saturday I drove round to Portrush...there was quite the choppy sea but it got smoothed out with the long exposure:

Portrush West Bay

With the small aperture/large f-stop and a fairly slow film (Ilford FP4+ Delta has a box speed of 100ISO but I was rating it at 50) you're always going to get long-ish exposures.  And once you're longer than 1 second there's film reciprocity failure compensation to take into account. Ilford recommend a factor of 1.26 for FP4+ (take the suggested shutter speed and raise it to the power 1.26). From memory the first shot in Portstewart was 12 seconds and the second one in Portrush about 30s, hence the smooth sky and sea.  There was a bit of burning in to both sky and sea above.  Contrast in the negative was a bit high in both shots so in the future I need to pull back on exposure, or developing, or both a little but I was reasonably happy for the first attempts.  

Pinhole photography is simplicity itself - no aperture controls, no shutter speeds and with the 4x5 sheet film there's not much to do there either - simply pull the dark slide, lift off the pinhole cap and count the seconds.  The Titan Camera is so light - even on the tripod it's so easy to carry.  I'm hooked already!