Hi folks, I am a brand new pinholer but learning VERY FAST because for reasons I won't bother to try to explain at the moment, it came to me about a month ago that pinhole was the way to express what I'm trying to say in the work that I'm showing in my fall show. One of the things I attempted right away, along with cardboard boxes, was a 35mm pinhole camera, for color work. I encountered a problem that seemed to require more research and experiment than I had time for, and my local/regional consultants were as puzzled as I, so I dropped that for the moment and am focusing on monochrome (I print in gum bichromate) pinhole images for this show, using negatives from the cardboard boxes.
But this thread on 35mm pinhole makes a lightbulb go on over my head --(duh!) this might be the place to ask a collective mind about my problem. My camera is an old Minolta 202 SRT body. I use a roughly 100mm lens most of the time, so to work at my accustomed distance I stuck the core from a roll of duct tape on the front and taped it on well with black tape; it gives me a 95mm focal length. I don't know the size of the needle; it's one the owner of my local photography supply store, who happens to be a pinhole hobbyist, had on hand. My inspection by loupe showed it was somewhat smaller than my smallest, which was a #10. For calculation purposes I estimated it at .016 (I guess that must be inches) but I have not actually measured it. All I cared at the time, in my rush to make pictures, was it was smaller than the #10, which made blurry pictures that everyone loved but couldn't be enlarged even a little bit. My film of choice for color work is Fuji Reala, ISO 100, and I stayed with this film for the pinhole work. Okay, so here's my problem: The exposures on this thing are completely wacko. I shot four or five rolls of film to try to get a bead on the exposures but never could come up with a reliable way to predict whether the exposure would be even in the ballpark, which is why I gave up on it for the moment, although I'm quite intrigued with the potential. The only image that came out exposed right at an exposure I estimated to be near the right exposure, (8 seconds under high overcast) can be seen at (I hope I've got this right): http://www.p at ???????/discussion/upload/images/greenpillar.jpg Mostly everything else I took at what seemed the right kind of times was way overexposed (I'm talkin *black* negatives) and only much shorter (fraction-of-a-second in most cases) exposures yield images that can be seen. However, those images are also very very grainy and don't lend themselves to enlargement because of the grain. One of them can be seen at http://www.p at ???????/discussion/upload/images/trestle_bay.jpg I don't know if the grain is evident on the screen, but it's there. So if anyone has any ideas about what's going on here, I'd like to hear. Thanks much, Katharine Thayer
