A mini-pinhole

These are a couple film canister pinholes I took a bunch of years ago in Portland, OR. I was taking a self-portrait of myself and the fellow on the right asked me what I was doing. When I told him I was taking a pinhole shot, he volunteered to "sit" for a portrait. I taped the canister to the railing and exposed for probably about 15 seconds. I used lith film since it was easy to load in the darkroom and easy to tray develop. Because it's lith film, there are lots of little black and white marks in the negative. I removed some with Photoshop but it's really too thankless a job to clean up entirely. Plus, I consider it part of the aesthetic. The negatives were contact printed on silver gelatin paper. I scanned from the print.

Autumn showers bring mushrooms

Wheatridge Grange

Someone had taken the time and effort to cover the exterior of this building with metal sheeting to keep it from getting damaged. However, they never bothered boarding up the doors. The back side interior of the grange was in overrun by pigeons. It looked like prime hanta virus breeding ground. Needless to say, I didn't go inside. I took this picture last month with my Fujica 6x4.5 film camera.

Double exposure surprise

Last weekend, I developed four rolls of film. While loading two of them, I noticed that they didn't feel right...one loads roll film for development completely in the dark so you can't visually inspect what you're doing. I thought it was odd that there was tape attaching the front of the roll to the paper backing. I chalked it up to it being slightly odd film (Adox 50). While I was in the development process (18 minutes of developer time gives you a lot of time to ponder things), I realized that I probably was developing two rolls of unexposed film. Although this possibility was extremely annoying and seemed more likely as I continue to think about it while processing, I didn't scrap the process because there was a chance that I hadn't screwed up (a very, very slim chance).

Well, one roll was completely blank. However, one of the rolls had been sent through two different cameras on two different occasions. The results were surprisingly good. One set of shots had been taken on the streets of Paris with my Lubitel square format while the other set had been taken at Burroughs Mountain at Mount Rainier with my Fujica 6x4.5.

The mannequins had been abandoned in the street along with some garbage. Notice how there are two shots overlapping the Paris shot in picture one. There is a slight overlap of two shots in the second picture.

Although I was bummed that I screwed up with one roll (especially since Adox 50 is a soon-to-be disappeared film), I am really happy with my error. I don't know that I'll do that deliberately in the future, but I might consider it.

Bad film and a dark night

I had some expired Kodak film (I think it was from 2003) lying around that I decided to abuse before actually using it. I stuck it on the deck to bake in the sun for a couple days and then put it in the Ansco cheapie camera and left it there for at least a month before finishing the roll. Well, most of the shots were crap...though the grain of the film turned into what looked like astro turf. Here is an example of the astro turf look. This is a photo of my friend, Carla in the woods. Rather than look like her usual lovely self, she appears to be being eaten alive by grass.

Anyhow, I did get one shot that I kind of like. It's a shot of the ferris wheel at the Puyallup Fair with a smear of lightness across it. With a little tweaking in Lightroom, it looks a little better.