Experimenting With Pinhole Photography at Home

After doing the workshop with pinhole cameras and making some successful photographs, I wanted to try it again at home. I wanted to take photographs of my living space as a reflection of myself, however it did not go as planned at all.

I researched a pinhole photographer called Justin Quinnell, who inspired me a great deal.

First of all, none of the photographs came out. I had nine little scraps of photo paper, and I ended up using all of them. It could have been an issue with the camera, as there might have been a tear in the tin foil, but that would have meant that the paper would have been dark, as it would have been over-exposed. I think that the problem lies within the exposure times, and the home made developer and stopper. I didn't know the proper times to expose my film with, so I would leave the pinhole open at varying times. Since none of the photos came out, I didn't know whether I was getting a good exposure time or not. I made the developer and the stopper myself at home with a fairly simple method. The recipe called for 200ml of warm water mixed with dried mint (the mint contains caffic acid, which helps the silver ions convert to silver). I didn't have any mint however, so I used coffee, which also contains the acid. Then, you take a further 200ml of water, and drop two 1000mg effervescent vitamin c tablets in. After they dissolved, you mix it with the coffee/mint. That's the developer. It's a very alkaloid mixture, so to balance it and stop the reaction, I made a stop bath which consisted of 200ml water, and 5ml lemon juice. The issue I think was that the recipe was using dried mint for the developer, and we measured the coffee with the same measurements as the mint, which could have been the wrong ones to use for that substance. Anyway, it didn't work, which is disappointing.

I was really hoping that this would work as well as it did in the workshop, because then I would be able to use them as final pieces for the exhibition. Instead however, I am left with nothing but pink and brown sheets of paper and a broken heart.

If I were to do this whole thing again, I think I would make another camera (perhaps out of a beer can), and I would develop the photo paper with actual chemicals, rather than attempting to create them myself.