My 35MMC Article is Published!

Casa Rinconada, Chaco Canyon National Historic Park

There's a silver gelatin contact print of this image hanging on a wall in my home. It was made in the late 1990s using a sheet of resin-coated black-and-white darkroom paper exposed at Chaco Canyon in a handmade pinhole box camera. The resulting "paper negative," after processing and drying, was contact printed onto a sheet of Forte fiber-based paper. Contact printing involves working in the darkroom under red safelights with a sheet of the final print paper face up on the table and the paper negative face down atop it, pressed together using a sheet of glass, and exposed to white light for a predetermined amount of time. After processing, the fiber print is dried, but fiber paper tends to badly curl toward the front side, so various tricks are used by darkroom workers, including weighting the paper under a stack of books, or drying the paper on metal screens. Still, such prints will always have a bit of a curl, so ultimately the print ends up being dry-mounted, using heat-activated waxed mounting paper, onto a stiff sheet of matte board.

This is how silver gelatin fiber prints were processed and presented back in the 20th century, back in the heyday of silver gelatin photography.

Forte was a brand of fiber-based silver gelatin printing paper manufactured in eastern Europe, and is no longer in production. There are many such papers, loved by photographers, that have passed away into obsolescence.
There are other paper negatives from this same camera, languishing in sleeves in notebooks, and the camera itself is collecting dust in the loft in my garage. Such is the lifecycle of such creative pursuits.

Then a funny thing happened. I on occasion like to peruse the photography website 35MMC. In the last year or so the website has been more difficult to maneuver around, with a plethora of pop-up ads and notices that makes reading the otherwise fine articles a bit of a faff. One day several months ago I'd had enough, and ended up sending off a complaint email to Hamish Gill, the site's owner. What I got back was more than I expected. I was offered free access via a password, to bypass the ads (there is a subscription level to 35MMC that gains access without ads), and I was also offered the opportunity to write an article as well. Hamish was kind enough to guide me through the process of writing the article to the correct formatting standards and eventually I had my article written, uploaded and edited to Hamish's standards.

Then I waited. He said it'd take a number of weeks before the article would be published.


Special Collections Library

Then just the other day I checked 35MMC once again, and my article had gone live! I knew something was up even before checking the website because in my email inbox were already several comments from readers of the article. I was published!

It's interesting to me how my interest in pinhole photography has waxed and waned over the years. I'd made that Chaco Canyon photo in the late 1990s, and by the mid-2000s I'd become a regular on F295, the now-defunct pinhole photography website. Longtime lurkers and participants of that website I'm sure may remember that photo as one I'd shared years ago. But since then, it's resided mainly as a matted and framed print on my wall.

Along with sharing pinhole photos I'd also been active in sharing my camera-making adventures. The box camera I used to make that photo was one such project, that aimed to offer one solution to the problem of taking multiple large-format negatives inside the camera without resorting to expensive and bulky sheet film holders.


Front view of the 8-inch format falling plate camera

The solution I ended up employing in this camera was a falling plate design. I didn't invent the idea; or rather, I reinvented it and only discovered after the fact that these had been used since the 19th century. My version uses matte board film holders, each of which hold an 8-by-10-inch sheet of photo paper, cropped to square format. The camera holds eight such film holders, in the back of the box. Along the left and right edges of the holders are a set of notches, that engage a set of movable pins in the camera, operated by a pair of sliding knobs. After the front-most negative has been exposed, it is dropped into the bottom of the box by slightly tilting the box forward and operating both side knobs simultaneously, which frees the holder to fall face down sufficiently far in the box to reveal the pinhole's view to the next film holder. The matte boards are so configured that their side notches alternate up, down, up, down; move the knobs up to drop one holder, then move the knobs down to drop the next holder, etc.


Tent Rocks National Monument, New Mexico

Along with figuring out how to make this camera actually work in practice, I also worked out how to make using black and white print paper into a practical in-camera film. This paper isn't sensitive to the entire visual spectrum of light; being darkroom paper it lacks red sensitivity (which is why it can be handled under red safelights in the darkroom). So the paper is sensitive mainly to the UV and blue end of the spectrum.

It's sensitivity is also very low; effectively its "ISO" is around 3-6, depending on the paper. This means the long exposures normally associated with pinhole lenses are even longer because of the "slow" paper.

The version of this paper I used in the Chaco Canyon photo was "multigrade," meaning its image contrast is dependant upon the color of the light. This is a feature normally used in the darkroom to adjust the contrast of your print by employing colored filters to the negative image projected from your enlarger. But what was intended as a feature ends up being a problem when trying to use this paper in outdoor daylit scenes, as the UV and blue daylight ends up causing the images to be excessively high in contrast.

Eventually I learned to use a fixed-grade paper for my negatives, resulting in more control over contrast. I also learned to "pre-flash" the paper with a faint exposure that serves to elevate the shadow detail, further reducing excessive contrast.

I would eventually go on to use these learnings with other falling plate pinhole box cameras, which I hope to share with the broader photographic public in future 35MMC articles. But until then, I hope you get a chance to read the article, and drop a comment at the end if you so desire.