Pinhole tests

I was out with the TiTAN 4x5 pinhole again...it's so light it seems kind of cheating.  Glass is heavy!  Saturday mid-morning and Portstewart Strand was already pretty busy.  If you're wondering, driving your car onto the beach is a Irish thing and has been known to confuse non-natives.  There is a risk involved, of course (see here) but if you're sensible (debatable, given what we're talking about) then usually you're OK.  Some beaches around here are best walked onto, though - the beach at Castlerock is well known for shifting sands and many times people are caught out as they try to leave the beach.  The local farmers make a few quid by towing cars out with their tractors.  

I didn't go down to the beach on Saturday - just stayed up top and got the cobwebs blown away by a strong westerly.  The temperature has dropped about 10 degrees lately but it was bright and sunny so not unpleasant in spite of the cold.  I took one shot - this is it:

Portstewart Strand on the TiTAN pinhole.  Ilford FP4+ Delta on MGV RC paper.  Pretty amazing what you can capture without a lens.

As I think I've said before, with the camera you get a DIY Exposure disc to help calculate what the exposure should be for a 'lens' that is an effective aperture of f/206.  I'm rating FP4+ Delta at 50 and most times the indicated shutter speed is more than a couple of seconds, so a bit of extra is required to compensate for film reciprocity failure.  Up to now I have been going by Ilford's recommendations but I tried cutting back a bit for this shot, as previously I've been losing highlight detail.  The other, probably more significant aspect is of course developing time and here things are a little more complicated as I'm using continuous agitation in an old Unicolor drum with a motorised base.  Up to now I've been cutting back on recommended dev times by 15% but this time I reduced it even further.  The negative came out looking better, with good highlight detail (in the blacks on the negative, of course).  There was still a bit of burning in on the sky required for this one but at least there was something on the negative to work with.