The destruction of Jim's Beemer

Ok, the BMW wasn't destroyed, but the image nearly was. i was cutting down some 8x10 sheets of Kodak CSG x-ray film for the Speed Graphic and I noticed that I had some sort of oddly sized pieces of film in the bag with the 8x10's. So I decided to go grab my homemade pinhole camera and cut one of these down to fit in it. It only takes one 'sheet' at a time, so I don't load it very often, but this was just sort of asking to happen. So I load it up and set it in my 'take to work' pile with my sunglasses and keys.

About mid-day the following day, I was looking out my window and discovered that Jim's beemer was in the parking lot, which was unusual since he normally works in a different building. It was parked in front of a sort of dirt embankment that I decided would provide an adequate place to set the camera since the exposures are generally too long to hand-hold. I went out and made a little shelf in the dirt upon which to set the camera. Then I took an f/16 meter reading with my Sekonic L-508 at iso 80 and consulted my exposure table to find the f/217 exposure time. Three seconds! That sounds long, but my shutter is a piece of gaffer's tape stuck over the pinhole (did I mention this camera was homemade?) and I wasn't sure I could take it off and put it back on in 3 sec without shaking the camera a lot and making a blurry pic. So I took another reading holding the light meter vertically and sort of in the shade of the car. Another consult of the exposure table and I got 12sec! Perfect! That is enough time so that the jiggling of the camera won't cause significant blur.

I went home that evening and decided to do the development in Adox Adonal at a dilution of 1+100. I mixed the chemicals and got everything together in the bathroom. I had read that you can monitor development of this film under a safe light and since I wasn't exactly sure of the development time, I decided to keep my red LED headlight turned on. That was the first bad decision. I turned out the room lights and took the film out of the camera. Placing it in the chemicals, I started the timer. I had set my 'safe light' up on a shelf pointed toward the ceiling so as not to risk fogging the film. But then for some reason I started to worry because I could not see an image appearing. I took the light down and shone it right down into the tray where the film was. There was a bit of an image starting to emerge, so I put the light back, but the damage was done. About 20sec later the film was almost completely black. I took it out of the developer and after a quick rinse under the tap, I put it into the fixer. Six minutes in the rapid fix and I figured it was done, but it was still just black. I turned on the lights and started the final wash with little or no hope of getting anything out of my labors. I held it up to the light and could see the faint but distinctive BMW grill. It was really dark, but my scanner is pretty good at pulling out contrast where there seems to be none.

So here it is. Low contrast, extreme grain, but not completely offensive or even unartistic. I think the combination of the grain and the distortion of the curved-plane pinhole image makes a sort of interesting image. The really fun thing about this camera is that I don't really have any idea at all what kind of image is going to come out of it. That may drive the 'control your process' photographers crazy, but I like to have fun with it.

Pictorialism

Depending on who you ask, you will get a different answer as to what 'pictorialism' means when talking in context of photography. I will offer a brief layman's understanding since it is an interesting genre to me. When photography started to become more accessible to a wider set of practitioners there was a feeling that it was not 'art', but merely documentation. For us in the 21st century, this is a bit odd and let me explain why. Today we have cameras and lenses that are capable of reproducing a scene/subject with virtual perfection. The colors are rendered precisely how our eye sees them, the edges of the in focus parts of the image are razor sharp, etc. To me that is documentarian photography. What was happening a hundred years ago was grainy emulsions paired with low-ish resolution lenses and variable processing chemistry, resulting in an image that was recognizable as a particular scene or subject, but it was soft and probably blurry from movement during the long exposure and finally it was in greyscale. Regardless of these 'imperfections', the fine artists of the day (painters, sculpters, etc.) decided that this new technology was not art. As you might imagine, photographers took umbrage at this sentiment and so began the pictorialism movement. This is what we would today call 'fine art photography' although some people hold a narrower definition. These photographers were taking photos of landscapes and flowers and still life that had practically no journalistic value and were meant solely for display. They were 'paintings' in silver halide instead of colored pigments.

Often these days, when you hear the term 'pictorialism', it will be attached to an image that is soft focus, out of focus, blurry or some combination of these. However, that is not necessarily pictorialism. To me the point of this style is to make something enjoyable to look at that is intentionally ambiguous or 'painterly' to some degree. It could be abstract like my photo of a puddle above or it could be well focused and objective like my image of the eucalyptus tree below.



Whatever style of pictorialism suits your fancy, give it a try. Start out with viewing some pictorialist images. There are lots of them as this movement is about 100 years old and going strong.

Look up Alvin Langdon Coburn...

or Alfred Stieglitz.