World Pinhole Photography Day 2020

I enjoy the occasional foray with a pinhole camera, even building one myself not so long ago and so was annoyed with myself for missing World Pinhole Photography Day (WPPD) in 2019. I was determined not to miss it this year however and had even scouted out a couple of suitable locations on the River Calder ready for the big day. I was it seemed all-set and ready to go.

I missed WPD-2019 and had big plans for 2020

WPPD is held on the last Sunday in April – the 26th this year – and of course, I’m being shielded at home and not allowed out of my yard! Best laid plans and all that.

I was determined not to miss the fun though and so the night before I loaded a fresh roll of Acros II into my wooden Zero Image 612 pinhole camera and dug out a mini tripod. At 7.30am on WPPD morning I was out in my backyard with pinhole camera, mini tripod and light meter to capture my first WPPD submission.

World Pinhole Day 26th April 2020 – my submission

When set to 12×6 my pinhole camera takes five frames (you can shoot six but the sixth is truncated) and as exposure can be hit and miss it is important to think before opening the shutter. I took three compositions, two of which I ended up scanning. The first two compositions were bracketed, two frames at different exposure times, and I used an App on my phone as a light meter having first checked with my handheld meter that it was reading sufficiently accurately. The benefit of the App is that it will display the exposure for an f-stop of 150 which my light meter does not.

After breakfast I processed the roll of film in Perceptol (1+1) and was chuffed to find some decent exposures; indeed, every frame could be darkroom printed if desired and the negatives scanned very nicely on my Epson scanner. My chosen image (above) was uploaded the following morning although I did upload it to my Flickr photo stream on the Sunday afternoon along with one of the other compositions. The third composition I chose not to use as it had not worked as well as I’d hoped but two out of three is not bad!

The image is awaiting moderation by the WPPD team but will eventually be viewable HERE I believe.

Scanning colour negatives

With all the differences between different colour negative film stocks, scanning can be a bit hit and miss. Here I briefly demonstrate the method I use, it is not perfect but produces acceptable results most of the time. I’m sure with a far more rigorous approach it could be done better but who wants to spend hours scanning and processing negatives – I’d much rather be in the darkroom!