Feb 22 2011 2 comments
 

DIY pinhole camera.

i’ve been occupied with pinhole photography lately. i’ve always wanted to do some experimenting with pinhole photography, but never managed to due to several reasons… after doing some reading up, i made some plans and calculations to create my first pinhole camera. medium format film seemed like a perfect film format to use, so i thought it would be a good idea to involve one of my Mamiya RB67 film backs in this little ‘project’. doing so, decent film handling would be ensured.

 

i asked my dad to make me a wooden front cover to put in front of the film back. whenever i ask him to make me something, i give him some measurements and ideas and he always manages to come up with something that looks way better than i could even imagine :D gotta love it!

 

so the pinhole camera(i named her ‘Zulma’, that’s a pretty descent camera name if you ask me ;-p) is mainly a Mamiya RB67 film back and a wooden front cover held together by a bunch of rubber bands. the camera has a focal length of 48mm(equivalent to 24mm in 35mm format) and an aperture of f/300(will be changed to f/160 soon though).

 

 

below are some pictures of my first test roll. the main purpose was to check whether the pinhole covered the entire negative; turns out it did, so mission accomplished!

 

i’m currently using a 0.16mm pinhole(gives an aperture of f/300), because that’s what i had available. the optimal pinhole size should be 0.292mm for my setup, so i’ll be using a 0.3mm pinhole(gives an aperture of f/160) soon. because the pinhole size(and the aperture) is currently way too small, diffraction effects increase a lot and cause much blur. hence the not-that-sharp-photos below. i somehow like the blurriness though…

 

all pictures were exposed for 90 seconds. film used: Ilford Delta 100(developed in Rodinal 1:50).

 

 

 

 

 

the photos are far from perfect. there are still some flaws, but the wooden front cover is just a test version. hopefully the issues can be addressed in the next ‘version’ of the wooden front cover…

 

-bert

 


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Mar 04 2010 5 comments
 

my new home.

yes, yesh, YESH… i’m still alive, somehow. my photography activity went far below zero during the past few months, but things will change soon! a few months ago, my brother moved out of the house. i claimed his room and had it transformed to my very own darkroom. well… i came up with the plans and ideas and my dad realized them, so big thanks go out to my dad for his major efforts!

 

i took some pics of the darkroom with my crappy digital camera. image quality isn’t that great, but good enough to give you an idea of what the room looks like…

 

below’s a picture of the wet side of the darkroom. the walls aren’t really in the “traditional darkroom colors”(black, red, grey, …) though. i first wanted to test whether the current colors(in combination with the safe light) caused any fogging. after doing some tests, it appeared that no fogging occured(not even after more then ten minutes, so i should be safe). no need to have the walls repainted then…

 

at the moment, i’m using this part for drying my prints, but that’s just temporary. later on, i’ll have a complete drying rack underneath the sink…

 

“zé chemikals!”. looking forward to experiment!

 

the sink is completely made out of wood. metal cools down chemicals pretty fast, so i opted for a wooden sink painted with epoxy paint(the same paint is also used for boats).

 

on the other side of the room is my brother’s old desk, which i’m using to put my enlarger on;
a lovely Omega enlarger.

 

never liked color enlargers before, but i’m definitely lovin’ this one!

 

 

 

so, now i can finally print my negs again… that’s a pretty big motivation for me! this room will definitely be my new home where i’ll be spending entire weekends…

 

-bert

 


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Oct 04 2009 6 comments
 

21 july 2009

21th of July; Belgium’s national day. for the first time in my life, i went to Brussels on Belgium’s national day. i thought there would be lots of interesting things to see on that day, but i was WRONG! it was way too crowded(for my likings) and due to a death threat against Queen Fabiola, you couldn’t really go anywhere you wanted…

 

so in the end, i finished only one roll of slide film(120 format, 6×7, so ten pictures in total :p). it was also the first time i used my Mamiya 7II (w/ 80mm lens; equivalent to 39mm in 35mm format), so i’m actually posting a test roll here. the pictures aren’t all that great, but they’re still okay(sorry Sebastian! i know i should strive for more (blog) quality, instead of posting entire test rolls :D). i’m more disappointed in the way my scanner can’t correctly reproduce the colors of slide film. i’ve experienced this before with slide film. the colors simply don’t match up with the colors seen on the slides. quite a shame, ’cause i like the colors of Ektachrome 200… especially with the slightly yellow cast due to expiration of the film).

 

photo geek info:
Mamiya 7II, Mamiya N 80/4 L, Kodak Ektachrome 200 (expired in 2004)

 

when i saw the scene below, it immediately reminded me of the heated discussion about banning headscarfs in Belgium. i think it’s a pretty pointless discussion though, which is generally fed by xenophobes *slash* Islamophobes… the Belgian flag with “nostalgia” written on it, reminds me of the people who keep whining about how good everything was when there weren’t so many immigrants around yet… *sigh*

note to self: stop walking before taking a picture next time ;)

 

this picture looks better on slide, because my scanner has cut off the lower part of the picture. the woman’s elbow isn’t really cut off on the original picture. Ektrachrome slides have this big border at the top and nearly no border at the bottom, so the neg holder overlaps the bottom part of the slide, hence a part of the picture is cut off…

i need anti-Newton ring glass for my scanner so badly, so that i can finally scan the WHOLE negative. i best buy it before i start scanning this shitload of film, ’cause otherwise i’m going to end up with cropped pictures again :-/

 

at some point, i even found a random building site more interesting than Belgium’s national day.

 

this is my favourite picture of the roll. i stood next to him for a while; observing him, setting up my camera, pretending as if i was going to take pictures of the soldiers behind him(when he looked in my direction) :D

here, he looks quite surprised, yet curious…

 

… and here, he looks rather annoyed by me taking pictures haha :’ )

 

these poor fellas stood there like this for soooooo long. you can tell by the guy in the middle that it was pretty tiring. they each looked up like that from time to time.

 

little guy watching the soldiers with their flags suffer.

 

there i stood… completely locked in by the crowd and barely able to move. and before i even realized King Albert flashed by in his “pope mobile” like jeep. i wasn’t really prepared for this, so i quickly guessed at camera settings et voilà… still a miracle that i was able to take a picture, as it all happened so fast.

 

cropped to square format. looks better this way…

 

there… my first roll with the Mamiya 7II. i especially used slide film to check how accurate the light meter(center-weighted, not ttl) was. i’m so used to ttl metering, but exposure was pretty accurate *yay*! i just love my Mamiya 7II!

 

ps: i excluded one picture because it was completely unsharp. sometimes i get too enthusiastic and then i tend to forget that i’m taking pictures with a rangefinder… and i simply forget to focus *n00b* :” )

 

 

cheers.
bert

 


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