Ritardando - photography slowed down

Two hours

chw — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:43:59 +0000

One and a half hours before sunrise:

Half an hour before sunset:

Both images taken this summer with Leica M4P and pinhole body cap 28mm f/128 on Agfapan 100

There’s Something to Digital Pinholes As Well

chw — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:00:17 +0000

As much as I love taking my photographs the traditional way, by exposing silver halogenide crystals to light, there are certain advantages to digital pinholery: Modern cams come equipped with a live view screen that gives at least an idea of the framing even in low light (not as helpful as a rangefinder, but definitely better than using pinholes on SLR cameras), and you can more or less freely switch sensor sensitivity to match your needs in terms of exposure time.

Here are two recent examples, taken with a Sony NEX-3 cam (which currently might be the most affordable option to add digital functionality with an acceptable crop factor to an existing range of Leica M lenses) equipped with M-mount adapter plus Pinhole Body cap 28mm (42mm equiv.) @ f/128. The third image shows the making-of of one of the shots in Hamburg’s Planten un Blomen park (cell phone cam).

Dogs Are Not Natural Pinhole Photography Models

chw — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 21:28:02 +0000

Baltic Sea coast earlier this autumn. Leica M w/ 25mm hole and orange filter, rock as a tripod, 2 sec. approx. on Rollei Retro 400 film

When 2.5 hours of exposure still aren’t enough

chw — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:51:11 +0000

Earlier this summer we spent a few days cycling along the eastern German Baltic Sea coast. One night on the beach, with nothing more than the stars above us, I used the pinhole-modded Agfa Clack for some long-time exposures of up to 2.5 hours. This turned out to still be way too short though; here’s a first contact scan, heavily adjusted to at least show some structure; on the light table there’s hardly anything to see on the negative at all. – Well, let’s pretend those dust specks I didn’t care to retouch are the stars

WPPD 2010: My Contribution

chw — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:37:52 +0000

My son’s soccer team warming up, later to win 7:0. Taken with the modded Agfa Clack on Tri-X 400, using a yellow filter, ca. 1sec exposure. Clicking the image leads to the official gallery.

Don’t forget: April 25 is Pinhole Day

chw — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:58:08 +0000

Well, the headline says it all… This year’s last April sunday marks pinhole day’s 10th anniversary. Let’s all go out and find a great spot to photograph through a small hole! (If I’m not mistaken, this year will see my fourth contribution.)

Getting Rid of the Dust on Your Scans

chw — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:54:12 +0000

It’s not just the act of taking the photo that’s slowed down by exposing through a pinhole; here I’m also encountering certain specific difficulties in postprocessing, namely in undusting pinhole negative scans. That’s because the automated anti-dust routines in imaging software tend to work best in blurry, out-of-focus areas of an image while pinhole images usually aren’t out of focus. So here’s how I clean up dusty negatives:

In scanning, I do use the infrared-based repair tool of Silverfast, though on a low level only in order not to damage image details. For photographs with huge homogenous areas, e.g. clear skies, I might apply a two-step approach in Silverfast, using its advanced, layers/masks-based control of repairing specks and scratches. As this process takes a lot of time even on fast machines though, it isn’t handy for pictures with complex structures, so most of my cleaning-up happens in Photoshop, after I’ve had Silverfast render the 16bit Tiff from the raw scan.

Much to my surprise, my old first-generation CS version of Photoshop still runs on my current Snow Leopard Mac with only minor bugs so far (giving me a welcome excuse still not having to switch to the clumsy Gimp), so that’s where I’m doing the following steps:

Here’s an image from my ongoing lowcolor project, taken with the pinhole-modded Agfa Clack on Kodak Portra 160 NC in Hamburg’s Wittmoor nature reserve. This one features areas with fine details (um, as fine as a pinhole can deliver, that is) as well as somewhat homogenous sky areas, and after some low-level Silverfast treatment, it still features quite a lot of dust specks. So let’s start in Photoshop by quick masking (toggle Q key, then use soft brush) the major spots in the sky (preferably you’ll have a copy of the background layer for each different approach, giving you the option to later mix different areas by masking):

Selection by quick masking applied, it’s worth a try applying the dust/scratches filter (from the noise filters menu) first. Caveat though: if the threshold’s too low, that filter will also annihilate your film grain:

So switch on preview, and play with the radius and threshold sliders until the scratches look something like this, brightness of the problematic spots adjusted to their surroundings without adding blur and killing grain:

As these are enlarged details, you might already stop here, at least if you plan to downscale the image for web purposes – you won’t see the remaining minor problems later. In a similar fashion, you can try masking and dust/scratch filtering the more detailed areas of your image, though you’ll probably need different levels of radius and threshold.

When there’s nothing more to repair in this semi-automated way, we’ll switch to the fine details in manual repair mode. Toggling the J key gives you a selection of repair tools. Make sure you get the manual repair brush, the one that needs your sampling input by clicking while pressing ALT. Right click opens the brush size menu; choose a soft brush not much wider than the speck you want to repair, then sample from an area with similar brightness and structure. When repairing bigger scratches, change your sampling point every now and then to make sure the result doesn’t look too cloned.

While this is a really slow procedure, this tool will, most of the time, yield results where you’ll only recognize the repaired areas in direct before/after comparison.

Note that the repair tool is somewhat sensitive to the target area’s surroundings no matter the sampling origin, so when you have to repair really close to dark or light areas (think negative borders) it’s a good idea to first draw a lasso selection around your target excluding the critical areas of “wrong” tonality.

Mixing Fringe Techniques

chw — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:08:22 +0000

Lately I’m experimenting with two different fringe photographic techniques combined: Shooting pinhole on C41 film, then developing in a special “low color” process. Resulting images are not exactly fine art, but I like what’s happening

Hamburg, Planten un Blomen park, Gingko tree. Captured on Kodak Portra 160NC film w/ Agfa Clack 6x9 pinhole

Point-and-Shoot, 1950′s Style

chw — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:35:30 +0000

My pinhole-modded Agfa Clack got a sister a while ago. Looks pretty much like the first one (so no new hardware photo) except for the lens which remains the original 1-element glass. Quite affordable at 5 Euro, even complete with leather bag this time!

Hamburg-Wandsbek. Tri-X at Push +1

With that baby you can happily snap along at 1/35 second and choose between “far” and “close” as well as between f-stops /11 and /13,5. While not as reduced as pinholing, using this tool still feels archaic and out-of-season. More pictures from the first film over at Silberpixel starting here, one per week through mid-December.

Rhythm of the Street(car)

chw — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:24:15 +0000

On a streetcar in Gelsenkirchen, ca. 15 minutes exposure time on Tri-X 400 with the Agfa Clack.