From: Mark Holm 
To: atm{at}shore.net
Reply-To: Mark Holm 


A few years ago I did a little pinhole photography with my sons.  For simplicity
I used photo paper instead of sheet film in the cameras.

Advantages:

You can use a safelight while loading and unloading instead of having to do
it in total darkness.  This was useful since my cameras were very crude.

You only need one developer since the negative and print are on the same material.

Printing paper is very easy to handle.

Disadvantages:

It is photographically slow.  Our exposures ran two minutes or more in
broad daylight.  (Through a pinhole of course.)  Actually, for the sort of
work we were doing this was a kind of advantage.  My "shutter"
consisted of a piece of black painted cardboard taped over the outside of
the pinhole.  Expsures could be timed with a wrist watch.  (BTW, I think it
is common for slow emulsions to have less reciprocity failure
proportionately than fast emulsions.  I don't know
if this applies to typical photo paper emulsions.)

It is insensitive to red, and strongly sensitive to blue light.  This lets
you use a safelight, but causes some strange effects when photographing
outdoor scenes.  The sky was way over exposed in all images until I added a
yellow filter.  This really lengthed exposures and only partly corrected
the over bright sky.

Contrast seems a bit high for contact printing paper negatives onto paper
prints.  This might not be a problem if you found the right paper or used
one of
the other photographer's tricks for controlling contrast.  I was using a
"normal" contrast paper.  Perhaps a "soft" paper would
be better for at least one of the stages.

Dynamic range seemed a bit low.  This might be nearly the same thing as
saying contrast was high.

Th Kodak paper I used had (unknown to me till I printed one of the
negatives) a faint pattern of the word Kodak printed all over the back of
the paper.  This is
not significant in normal printing, but when you use a paper negative to contact
print, the pattern prints through.

If you want to try this process, it is really quite easy, and the setup
will cost you not more than 50 dollars.  You don't really need a well made
darkroom.
    I fastened dark sheets over the not too light tight doors of my workroom
and
did the dark work there.  I washed the prints in a bathroom sink.  (Get so
called "resin coated" paper.  It only needs a few minutes of
washing.)

It makes a fun project to do with your kids.  With a little instruction and
supervision, a bright 4th grader can be doing it pretty much all by herself
in short order.

Mark Holm
mdholm{at}telerama.com

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