I came across a website the other day called The 7th Day which is an ongoing art project around the theme of long-exposure pinhole photography. That’s not your usual multi-mega-pixel digital photography; this is old fashioned analogue photography using proper photographic paper. The project offers readymade pinhole cameras which consist of a 35mm film canister with a small piece of black and white photographic paper inside. A tiny hole in the side of the canister acts as the lens and allows light in to create the image. After a period of exposure of at least seven days, or even more, possibly even years, the photographic paper is returned to The 7th Day to be scanned, edited and posted on the online archive. All this for the sum of €30.00 for each pinhole camera.
Now, I was somewhat sceptical that you would get anything on the photographic paper after that length of time and did some research, looking at how exposure times are calculated. And without going into too much technical detail, normal exposure times for the 35mm film canister pinhole camera supplied looked to be in the region of minutes or hours rather than seven days or more, obviously depending on lighting conditions. However, further research found something I recall from my own experience of analogue photography, something called reciprocity failure. This occurs during very long exposures when the usual behaviour of the photographic paper starts to fail, resulting in all manner of unusual effects.
And this seems to be what attracts people to The 7th Day project, you place your camera somewhere, leave it in place for at least seven days and then see what you get. I must admit to liking that idea, not knowing just what image, if any, will form on the small piece of photographic paper inside your 35mm film canister-based pinhole camera. One thing that does not attract me is the cost, €30.00, and I’m sure I can do it far cheaper myself.
Looking at the DIY cost to make a pinhole camera as supplied by The 7th Day, a box of 100 35mm film canisters can be bought for £24.00 on Amazon, that’s only £0.24 each. With the photographic paper, a 100-sheet box of 5″ x 7″ (125mm x 175mm) Ilford Multigrade glossy photographic paper comes in at £26.20 including delivery. The size of the photographic paper required for inside the film canister is approx. 45mm high by 60mm wide and the above box will give me around 150 of these, which works out at £0.16 per sheet. The actual size would need to be determined during testing.
So, total so far is £0.40. To make the final 35mm film canister pinhole camera, I’ll need some black electrical tape for the shutter, some cable ties or sticky pads to secure it in place and some thin aluminium sheet from a drink can. So, let’s round that up to £0.50. That’s considerably less than €30.00, which is about £25.00. There are no further costs for processing the images as my printer includes a flatbed scanner.
Right, so where are we at the moment. Well, all the required materials are on order, I’ve sourced some discarded aluminium drinks cans and everything else I require is in hand. Just waiting for the key elements to arrive, namely the 35mm film canisters and we can get cracking making those pinhole cameras, all 100 of them! And that’s just for starters.
The plan is to find suitable locations, install the cameras and leave them for at least seven days, then collect them, process the paper negatives and post them here on Planet Gary. I’ll also mount a few in the back garden and leave a few to run while longer, up to a month or even more, if I can resist the temptation to see what the results are. In the mean time I’ve been thinking about suitable locations, actually scouting out a few and also getting hold of some old-fashioned analogue media on the topic of pinhole photography, namely some books. More soon.
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