Re: Making pinholes without a darkroom?

Malin Fabbri writes:
> I got a question from one of my visitors... and got intrigued myself.
> Is there any way you can make a pinhole photograph without the use of
> a darkroom? The only thing I could think of was to put a pre-coated
> cyanotype sheet in the back of the camera and then expose, take out
> and wash it. The problem there is the exposure times though...
> somewhere around half an hour I guess. Any better ideas from anyone
> of you?

It seems, from the responses thus far, that the notion of "darkroom"
isn't well defined.

I'll say that in my workshops (got one starting tomorrow!), we begin by
converting Holgas for pinhole use precisely because they take roll film
and my students don't need their own darkroom. Of course, they take the
film to a lab and a darkroom is involved, but the photographer doesn't
need to have access to their own.

In one branch of my work, I use a camera of my own construction that takes
a 4x5 grafmatic back, but it also takes a Polaroid back; no darkroom.
I've seen that a Polaroid back is also available for the Holga (check
at http://www.freestylephoto.biz/sc_prod.php?cat_id=&pid=5957 ), and
Polaroid makes their own pinhole camera (eg,
http://www.freestylephoto.biz/sc_prod.php?cat_id=&pid=4739 ).

As to using cyanotypes as camera stock, I once set up a view camera
w/lens and made a six hour afternoon exposure of the shimmering San
Francisco cityscape; there was a faint image on the paper when I took
it out of the camera, but all traces of it washed away instantly.

--Eric
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Received on Tue Jun 15 12:04:10 2004