My Pinhole Photos (and negatives)

We’re done with pinhole cameras now, so I’m going to be uploading the ten positives and ten negatives that I came out with as finished products and presented for critique.

There were a lot of light leaks in my camera, but I like the feeling of them and the evidence of analogue photography that they leave behind, so I didn’t try to take them out when I made prints, and a lot of them weren’t removed when I cropped down my prints. They’re very small, in the physical range of approximately 4×5 but my camera was crooked and so are a lot of my prints and different ones cropped out to different sizes.

You can also see them all here on tumblr (under my pinhole tag) if you prefer. (they’re bigger there than here.) (I also have higher resolutions, but tumblr resized them down. These are probably big enough for the average internet user anyway.)

(I obviously need a new layout, but I just left a huge white space to keep from having to size-down my images any further and try to keep them from running into the text on the sidebar. Sorry, I don’t really have the time to be messing with layouts right now. Please scroll down. )

01 – negative

01 – positive

02 – negative

Positive 02

Jungle (negative)

Jungle

Negative 04

Positive 04

Negative 05

Positive 05

Positive 05 run though photoshop with an auto-tone filter. This is closer to how I would have liked the positive to look, but I couldn’t get the contrast right.

Fire Hydrant Negative

Fire Hydrant Positive

This is the actual contact print as developed by hand. The next one I’ll be uploading is run through photoshop with an “auto tone” filter and is probably closer to how I would have liked it to look, but I just couldn’t get it to come out with crisp enough blacks and a high enough contrast.

This positive actually gave me no end of trouble. I got beautiful tones on my test strips, but I couldn’t replicate them when I went to make my print. I don’t know if it’s because I was working on a different enlarger or if I changed a setting and didn’t realize it or something, but eventually I ended up having to develop this on completely different settings than my test strips.

Fire Hydrant Positive (auto-tone)

This is actually a little more washed out than I’d like it to be but I can’t seem to get a happy medium between this one and the other one. I experienced the same difficulties in the darkroom.

James (negative)