More Arista 8x10 pinhole photos

Today we woke up with clouds and chill. We were supposed to hit highs in the lower 70s, but as I was driving this morning, at about 9:30 a.m., the thermometer in the car said that the temperature outside was about 56 degrees. Fair enough, we don't hit the highest temperatures until the mid afternoon, about 1 p.m., but even then, which is when I arrived home, it still felt chilly, enough to justify wearing a windbreaker.

I went to the photo lab in Irvine to pick up some slides. I had a shipment of 24 (it turned out it was 25) 4x5 slides that I had submitted to be processed way, way back in early November, before the election. I also had some rolls of 120 film.

However, this post is not about slides, it is about 8x10 black and white pinhole negatives. These were taken with my aluminum 8x10 camera, the one that I was unhappy with because it gives me such blurry images, blurry even for a pinhole. These were old negatives I have been accumulating in an envelope because I didn't have the energy to process them. Finally, with the 20th Century Camera reel and the big Patterson tank, I can process two 8x10 negatives at a time, so that is what I did. Slowly but surely I will get through about 15 negatives that are waiting to be processed. 

This one is an old one, taken of the windmill structure at Heritage Park in Santa Fe Springs, CA. I guess I must have given it 2 minutes of exposure. I can tell you right off the bat, it looks blurrier than the 8x10 negatives taken with my wooden pinhole camera, but a big, big, BIG advantage is that there is no bright spot in the center. The vignetting on my wooden 8x10 camera is just unacceptable, it wipes out the image completely. This one at least preserves some evenness, and so, I think I will have to modify my opinion of this camera.

If only I could get the sharpness and the quick exposure times of my wooden pinhole camera, combined with the sturdy construction and the evenness of the exposures on my aluminum pinhole camera, I would be happy. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

The film was Arista 200 black and white 8x10 film, the exposure was for about two minutes in bright sunlight. Plus, the image is not so damnably wide-angle as for the wood pinhole camera!