"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved".
Ansel Adams
Early attempts with an old tin.
My early attempts at pinhole photography followed the path of many others and was based on using various tins loaded with paper or sometimes 5x4 sheet film. This meant reloading the camera on location by means of the old film changing bag which was always great fun and led to strange looks from passers-by. The small brightly coloured round tin always looked funny mounted on top of my large Benbo tripod too! One aspect of the round tin that I really liked was the distortion caused by the curved film plane and this was a design I have returned to in my teaching. I can remember being taught how to load daylight developing tanks in college. Once you had your hands in the black bag and had opened the film cassette you were committed and any stuudents who encountered problems were in there for ages, while other students brought them food and drinks! The camera did work well and produced interesting results, but after a short time it was obvious that I needed to look for an alternative camera design which could be pre-loaded and switched to my old 5x4 MPP field camera.
5x4.
I made several different prototype camera designs which would accept a 5x4 film holder that could be pre-loaded, before deciding to simply make a new lens board for my old MPP. This accepted the pinhole or the zone plate which I had now started to use, and allowed me to be able to take advantage of the adjustments and features of the MPP body. Composition was possible using a dark cloth and there is something special about using 5x4 which seems to suit the pace of pinhole work, the only drawback was the cost of 5x4 film and processing.
One memorable pair of images (above) that I took with this camera on a trip down to Cornwall turned out to present something of a mystery. Just a few miles before Land’s End, I stopped the car at a church in the village of Sennen when I spotted an old graveyard with a lovely Celtic cross on one of the graves. It was a bright day with just a few clouds in the sky and I quickly set up my tripod and MPP and took a light reading. For those who haven’t used 5x4, the film holders hold two sheets of film and you would normally expose both sheets of the same subject. Back at the lab you would process one sheet and assess the exposure. This allowed you to adjust the development time for the second sheet to produce the perfect result if any slight correction was needed. I was using the 120mm F80 zone plate on that camera with Fuji velvia 5x4 film at 50 ISO, and the light reading gave me an exposure of 4 seconds, allowing for reciprocity I rounded this up to 5 seconds. Exposing both sheets took seconds, so in theory nothing should change between the two exposures. When both sheets were processed there was an indistinct cloudy shape which had moved between exposures! Some time later I took the original 5x4 slides to the National Museum of Photography Film and Television where ironically they were preparing for an exhibition called The Unexplained. The curators of the exhibition were able to offer a specialised opinion of what might have caused the imaged on the pictures and were able to rule out reflections and film or processing faults and suggested if I had given them the images earlier I could easily have been included in their exhibition! If anyone can offer suggestions I would be most grateful. I have no pre-conceived ideas myself, but there was nothing to see on the day and it remains a great mystery!
Mamiya Press
The next stage in my search for the perfect camera for my pinhole work took me predictably to 120 roll film. I was looking for a camera that could be customised, and found an old Mamiya Press with a detachable roll film holder that produced images of 6x9 format. It was quite a good compromise having a viewfinder to help with composition and a good sized format giving 9 shots on a 120 roll. Not a bad compromise of quality and ease of use, although a little heavy for travelling around.
A couple of the images I took of a travelling Fair in Chester (right) using this camera were published in the well- respected Pinhole Journal produced by the Pinhole Resource Centre in Alberquerque New Mexico by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer, followed soon after by a mention in Darkroom User produced by Ed Buziak. The images were taken using the zone plate which had now become my standard technique and the focal length of the Mamiya was adjusted to take the zone plate I was using at that time which was the 120mm F80. I visited a travelling fair in Chester and thought the vivid lights worked well against the magic hour background lighting. Exposures were a challenge, especially when using transparency film but I calculated the exposure, which proved to be pretty much bang on. The theme of fairground lighting and other forms such as neon against various ‘magic hour’ skies has been something I have been attracted to for some time and working on these various themes over the years you begin the question where these recurring images originate. In my own case I was able to identify several occasions where these particular scenes originated. I imagine that the early visits to Blackpool planted the seed but on my first visit to America in 1976 I remember one particular moment pulling up outside a diner at traffic lights, and seeing the wonderful neon sign set against the magnificent sunset. It was something about the contrasting man made ‘chemical’ spectrum of neon colours against the infinite range of the magnificent natural sunset. This has often appeared in my work and I find it fascinating to analyse where these influences come from. The more I reflect, the more missing pieces of the visual influences jigsaw fall into place. If you look hard enough they are there somewhere in your past. The closest I have seen to the vivid images from those day was the film Funny Bones which offers a surreal view of Blackpool at its peak.
Customised 120 cameras. Lubitel
I think there is a frustrated designer somewhere inside me that loves to tinker with things like custom camera designs. Some people start off with a simple tin or something and seem to be able to stick with that, I on the other hand have gone through many different generations of cameras looking for the ideal camera for my needs. One of the first I tried was a 120 twin lens reflex Lubitel, which I have to say, has been the easiest and most successful of the format types to work with. The removal of the lower lens assembly takes seconds if you know what you are doing, and it is quite simply a matter of replacing the lower lens with a thin disc of aluminium sheet to accommodate the zone plate or pinhole that you want to use. The camera is otherwise unchanged. The film holder and wind-on mechanism are unchanged, the top lens which is of course the viewfinder work perfectly, and for those who like a square format it is the ideal solution. It is small to carry around and comes with the tripod screw on the base for mounting on a support. I even mounted a pair in tandem once to shoot stereo! The only issue for me was however the format. Some photographers love the square format, but I have always preferred the wider panoramic format, and so this took me one stage further to making my own cameras…. with a little help from Mr. Kodak.
Boot Sale Box Brownie 'donor' cameras.
As the designs of my cameras were refined with this design, for the first time it was possible to take my pinhole on holidays abroad so from this point onwards the first thing in my suitcase was the camera and a specially built lightweight tripod.
The first idea for this style of camera came from this desire to make my own cameras from scratch but lacking an engineering background or well-equipped workshop I have had to manage with hand tools and a shed. I used to collect old cameras and was always fascinated by the simple design of those old marvels. The spring operated shutters and wind on mechanisms were wonderful examples of simple designs. Looking at these old roll film cameras gave me the idea to take what I call the guts of a 120 format Box Brownie and cut them vertically in half and pull them apart to give 6x12 format rather than 6x6 and glue an insert of very thin ply (recycled wooden fruit boxes from the farm shop) to hold them in this position. I could also recycle other parts of the donor camera such as tripod mount and film advance knobs to use on the newly constructed, and slightly larger, new case. I have stayed with this method of construction ever since. The only changes I have made have been to reduce the weight and slightly improve the efficiency of the designs. I am now on my third generation and will probably stick with this one for some time as it works well and I really like the 6x12 format. Most of my work has been produced using this design so I have a number of images as examples.
Venice series.
When I worked as a ships photographer, Venice was my home port for nearly a year on my first cruise ship, so I knew it quite well. Even though time was quite limited on a more recent visit there with my wife, I still managed to shoot several rolls of film. In Venice there are photographic opportunities at every turn, and I thought that the technique of zone plate worked particularly well for the subject. The additional element of the waterways added movement to the images, which also worked incredibly well given the longer exposures that pinhole photography requires. The light of that region is wonderful and given that many part of the city are unchanged from when the place was established Venice is my favourite location in the world
Exhibition at Yale
One of the biggest challenges I have found over the years, and still struggle with to some extent, is finding the opportunity to concentrate on my own work. There is always something else to do, and you have to be quite determined to make time for your own work. I often find the best opportunity I have to do my own work is in the short breaks from teaching. Although it was difficult to work to a specific theme, ideas would still present themselves where ever I was. I modified a cheap set of lightweight tripod legs to accept a small head which was usually the first item packed in my suitcase and many afternoons would be spent discovering the landscape around our holiday locations. Several of my colleagues at Yale College had worked in pinhole photography and we agreed to mount a joint exhibition called Pinhole Visions. The majority of the work I put forward was from a recent trip to Venice
Holiday images
One of my ways of relaxing on holiday was to pack my pinhole camera, the lightweight tripod I had built and head off looking for inspiration. I had some wonderful times and met some great people on these adventures. The people I met were generally interested in this madman out in the mid-day sun with a mysterious wooden contraption and a tripod over his shoulder. One such time was in Turkey when I happened upon a marble factory. There was not actually a great deal to take but the workmen were having a tea break and invited me in to join them. During this extended tea break they asked me to take their picture. Although it was incredibly bright outside, inside it was very gloomy indeed, and finding the right exposure in seconds was quite a challenge. Thankfully they took my directions well, and remained very still. The shot was a lovely memory of people with no common language sharing a sweet Turkish tea in the hot afternoon.
Turkish stonemasons
Another holiday, this time to the Greek Islands and another long walk with my camera and tripod, but this time my climb to the top of a hill in the heat of the middle of the day rewarded me with one of my favourite images. After a climb of half an hour I discovered a beautiful church. Being Easter, the local people had tied offerings to the tree in front of the church. I loved the light and textures of the scene and placed the tree with the offerings in front of the church and shout several options. The length of the exposure gave me that subtle movement that I love about using pinhole cameras.
Offerings tree
Bullring images
When I was young I was taken to several bullfights while on holiday in Spain and the impression those experiences had on me led to further reading on the subject to try to understand firstly, what makes a person want to fight a bull and secondly, why do they do they rear and breed bulls specifically for their day in the ring? Hemmingway’s excellent book Death in the Afternoon went some way to explain the latter, but I still cannot understand the desire to risk death every day on the horns of a specially bred fighting bull, particularly in places like Portugal where they don’t kill the bull merely hold it down in submission, and there is a part of me that admires the sheer bravery of the men who face the bulls. At one point in the book he visits the famous ring in Ronda in Andalucía. I took my pinhole camera there and produced a series of image of the impressive arena. The smaller bullring at Mijas Peublo was less impressive but in the centre of the small mountain village I was able to roam around the whole area and produced some of my favourite images some of which were partly inspired by the famous engraving by Goya