Andrew Crocker 2/28/20 Andrew Crocker 2/28/20

Pinhole Fun

So, I’ve been shooting with Ilford’s HP5 film lately. The box comes with 25 sheets and I found I was left with just 1 sheet remaining in the box. What to shoot?

My poor little pinhole camera has not seen much action since we moved to Texas so I thought I would use up the last sheet in it and hopefully get back into the swing of shooting lens-less. It was 10 o’clock at night, so I loaded the film up and stuck the pinhole out on my back patio. The night was black as pitch, so I really wasn’t entirely sure if I had the thing aimed correctly.

Exposure was tricky and I told myself, “Self, you probably won’t have a usable image in the morning anyway, but what the hell? Let’s see what happens.” I opened up the shutter and left the camera sitting there until I woke up in the morning. Experience told me that an almost pitch black scene would take roughly 10 hours of exposure to get an image at iso 400. Problem is the sun would be well up by then and over-expose the film. So, I just had to make sure to close the shutter shortly after the sky started to really get bright at around 7 o’clock.

Presto! Not the most exciting of images, but fun nonetheless to make. I think I’ll be giving my trusty little pinhole camera a bit more shooting time in the future.

5” Pinhole, Ilford HP5+, 8 hours exposure, Caffenol C-L

Andrew Crocker 1/1/20 Andrew Crocker 1/1/20

Cala Lilies

Happy New Year, everyone! Yours truly is starting 2020 out on the right photographic foot. I did some work with a handful of Cala Lilies. While not colorful, they do have some very nice textures and shapes.

I also did a little experiment with the developer. For two images, Cala Lily 2 and Cala Lily 3, I used a standard Ilford Ilfosol 3 developer. For Cala Lily 6 I used a Caffenol C-L recipe, which is composed of coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. I’m amazed by the results! Caffenol certainly isn’t as convenient as the standard developer, but the results hold their own.

I’ll do a further write up on Caffenol in the future! Stay tuned. For now, I hope the start of your 2020 goes smoothly!