Is fun! Also today is world pinhole day, apparently, so I’ve built a little camera. Actually quite a big camera, about 40x40x25cm.
It’s basically a falling plate camera, with the paper negatives attached to 8 cardboard “plates” in the back, which are then manually pushed forward to fall down into the camera body after each exposure. The remaining plates are held in place with a small wood clamp thingy. I had a more elegant mechanism planned initially but then didn’t feel like measuring it all out so exactly and so it ended up being all a bit hacky. I just taped my photographic changing bag to the end of the camera, so I could handle the cardboard plates in daylight, without fogging the film. Or the paper, in this case.
I used Ilford MGRC in a size of 17.8x24cm, mostly because I had that lying around and also because I know it’s about ISO 3 in sunlight (with artificial light, it’s much slower, maybe ISO 1 or so).
The technical stats are always fun for these things: I’ve built the camera to roughly have the field of view of a normal lens, which at that negative size is about 300mm. The pinhole is roughly f430 (not a typo). So ISO 3 at f430 in bright sunshine makes for about 6 minutes exposure time for all of these.
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