My First Pinhole Album with a Fomapan 100 Film

After my previous article with a review of this film with normal exposure times, here, I post my impressions about pinhole bulb exposures. As you know, when the shutter times are greater than 1 second, almost every films require an exposure correction. Read more!

This is my impression of my first pinhole album, made using a Fomapan 100 film roll inside my Diana F+ camera. As you know, the pinhole aperture of this camera is approx. F150, so, even in daylight, you need to use the bulb (B) mode to obtain a photo.

I made these photos using a red filter (with a factor 8x) fixed with adhesive ribbon in front of the lens. Now, in a partially cloudy day, a 100 ISO film requires an aperture of F11 with a time of 1/60s without this filter. When you insert the red filter, the time increases to 3 stops, to 1/8s.

Now, the pinhole aperture is 7-8 stop smaller than F11, so you must increase the exposure time up to 16 – 32 seconds.

With this exposure time range, almost every film is subject to the Schwarzschild effect, that is, a reciprocity failure in the time-aperture rule. If you download the .PDF data sheet of this film, you can see that an exposure of 1 second requires a 2x extra time, an exposure of 10 seconds an 8x extra time and an exposure of 100 seconds a 16x correction factor. So, to take photos in this conditions, an interpolation between these data shows that you might use an exposure time between 160 and 480 second.

This time was too long for me, because when I took these photos there were people that were walking in the streets and a little car traffic. I could not ask to the pedestrians or cars to wait more than half a minute!

So, I decided to push this film at 400 ISO! Now, a 2x pushing of a low speed film is almost always a disaster, because the contrast increases abruptly, destroying the grey tones of the film. In these cases, there is a great recipe: a stand development in Rodinal (or R09 One Shot), at 1+100 dilution!

The development process was made in a tank, with a constant agitation for the first minute, then only few inversions every 30 minutes, for a total time of 90 minutes. The old Rodinal developer has a compensating effect when you use it at 1+50 or 1+100 dilution, and the film contrast remains acceptable.

As you can see in the photos taken in the woods, the red filter has has blackened the foliage color, making it darker than usual.

Few photos are still underexposed, because I didn’t have an exposure meter with me.

As you can see, the color of the sky before the thunderstorm was fantastic and dramatic! This is a great film, cheap but reliable, great to make experiments both with normal or long exposures. These photos were taken in Civiglio, a very small village in the mountains near my city, Como.

written by sirio174 on 2013-06-01 #gear #pinhole #review #long-exposure #red-filter #italy #diana-f #reciprocity-failure #como #requested-post #civiglio #schwarzschild-effect