Like most people who do photography, I have to many cameras. I do try to rotate through them when out for walks and it's fun to shot with the more quirky ones, like holga or sprocket rockets.
I already own three pinhole cameras, an Ondu, a Reality so subtle and a Chroma baby cube but with world pinhole day coming up I thought, why not make another one.
There are many ways to make pinhole cameras but I wanted something that would take 120 roll film and be a longer focal length than the 24, 30 and 40mm that my current camera have.
Nick Dvoracek this a well-known pinhole shooter and also someone who makes cameras and puts the plans for these cameras online.
The camera I decided to make was the 6x6 populist 60mm.
I printed the plans of the camera on to self adhesive paper to be able to stick them to the card I was using. The plans are quite easy to follow and with the cutting and glueing it took about a week to make the whole thing. Most of the pieces needed to make it were bits I had lying about, so the film advance knobs were old guitar volume controls and clothes pegs and the pinhole was a bit of soft drink can.
I realised early on the the pinhole was to big even using a small needle to make the hole.
A test roll of film showed that there was no light leaks but did tell that the pinhole was to large as most images were overexposed and not particularly sharpe.
Even using a small needle it was difficult for me to get a small enough hole, eventually I ending up buying a set of small drills from 0.1 to 1.0mm to drill the hole with, the actual size needed was 0.3mm.
As this was the first time making something like this, I knew there were things I could do better but was set to use it on the pinhole day photo walk.
I did have a little mishap with the camera. I slipped on some of the wet steps getting down into the foreshore at Greenwich and dropped it. The camera was OK but the two winders fell out and I feared that is would cause light leaks.
The roll of film was Kentmere 400 and when developed the whole film was black! So I assumed that with dropping the camera, light had so how got to the whole roll and destroyed it.
I have developed 100s of rolls of film a rarely make mistakes but I did on this one! It was only when developing another roll of Kentmere a few days later I realised my error. I use the Massive dev chart to work out Dev time. My developer is Bellini HC110, dilution B. Scrolling down the list I landed on the first one I saw and used that.
Ahhhh! I underdeveloped it! The actual timings should have been 6 minutes, this explains why there was nothing on the film.
So for now I have stopped working on this as I need to build a new model as this one does have a few things wrong with it and a new one will fix these problems.
Although this isn't the end of it.
Frankenholga
Having the right tools to make a good pinhole I was looking at what else I could make a pinhole camera with.
Remembering I had a second Holga I decided to see if I could convert this.
The Holga lens is only screwed on to the camera body but is held in place by a locking screw, some people force the lens off by just twisting it as hard as possible to snap the screw. The easiest way is to replace the front assembly as it is only held on by two screws accessed from in side the body, once this is undone the locking screw can be screwed back and the lens removed.
The Holga is know for only having two apertures or sometimes only one but as you can see this one does have two and for convenience I left it set on the larger of the two.
I decided not to remove the shutter so I can easily put it back to a normal Holga.
By removing the lens the camera is now a 50mm focal length instead of the normal 60mm but in all honesty I don't think it makes much difference.
Setting the camera to bulb mode allows for long exposures but any one that knows the Holga knows you can't lock the shutter open. There are items you can buy to fit and use a cable release but at present I just jam a clothes pegs into the shutter when it's pressed down.
One test roll of Kentmere showed that it's taking some pretty sharpe images for a pinhole.
I think I'm going to enjoy shooting with the Frankenholga.