DIY 3 Lens Pinhole

A new project – DIY pinhole with 3 lenses, multiple views onto one sheet of 8×10 or 5×7 photographic paper. The result http://rhysbaker.com/blog :

How?

^ 5mm foam board, I made the template myself after a few sketches, there was no maths involved I just made it up!

^ The raised part will form the curve which the paper will be wrapped around.

^ Foam board tower for the ‘film plate’

^ With the sides added (more foam board) and with the holes cut for the pinholes. OK, I said it was a 3-hole pinhole, it’s actually 6, 3 to be used on 8×10 paper and the 3 lower holes for 5×7. So far it’s held together with good old masking tape.

^ Pinholes added – the usual method, cut pieces of tin can, pierced with a pin taped over the hole with electrical tape. The next stages where to make a tight fitting lid and light proof the inside – I sprayed it matt black and sealed all the edges with black electrical tape.

Exposures are ‘experimental’, I exposed each hole separately, as ever with these things the exposure time depends on the weather. In the example on the main blog it worked out at about 25 secs per hole.

DIY Tilt Shift Pt.2

Finally, I got round to completing the DIY Tilt-Shift or the ‘Henry Hoover Tilt Shift’.

^ The Henry Hoover coil was attached with Super Glue intitially but that didn’t feel too secure so I melted heaps of glue with a gluegun onto the joints. Did it look pretty? No. The whole thing got a re-spray (I unscrewed the lens first).

^ It simply attaches to the camera via the modified body cap – Hey Presto!!

You need to shoot in Shutter Priority, I had the camera rated at ISO1600 with a shutter speed of somewhere between 1/60 and 1/100 second – you need to play about a bit. The lens focuses very close, about 15-20cm so it’s only really of any use for macro or close up work. Taking an image is best descibed as experimental, to focus you need to move and to get the selective focus part right requires a bit of dexterity with several fingers but thats all part of the fun. As a test I pinched 2 of the The Boys cars, placed them on a bit of white card near a window and got these:

Thats it! I’ll keep trying it out with different subjects and lighting,  I also think there is lots of room for expanding on this, I’m already looking for another lens to make another one.

Hammer Without A Master – New Blog Name – Why?

Hammer Without a Master – a piece of music by Pierre Boulez, also a track by the group Broadcast and the title of a  painting by the artist Joan Miro.

I began photo-blogging in 2005. I started off with a free Blogger account. I called the blog ‘Hammer Without a Master’. It didn’t last very long, maybe a year or so- I was never happy with Blogger’s suitability for photo-blogging, consequently my posts were rather haphazard and infrequent. I moved to aminus3 in 2007. I called that photoblog ‘It’s All around You’, it still exists, you can see it here. This was named after an album released by the band Tortoise.

I’ll be honest in saying that I’ve always struggled with the name ‘It’s All Around You’ – OK, it does what it says, it’s my photographs of stuff that’s around me/you/us. But there’s something a bit too twee about it, I find it a bit too ‘tree-huggerish’, too poetic, too sentimental. Non of which are really me or anything to do with what I photograph.

I’ve decided to return to my first photoblogging name of Hammer Without A Master – the Broadcast track of the same name is superb, and I admire Boulez’s reputation for precision. The words themselves are a little abstract, puzzling and intriguing. Is it hammer the noun or verb? Master as in commander/boss, or does it relate to originals and non-duplicates? And why would one be without the other? Or how does one work without the other? Etc. Etc. Perhaps its all about questions and decipherment.

Anyhow, I recently changed the layout of the blog (a combination of the Braeburn and theworldin35mm templates on pixelpost), and I decided ‘what the hell’,  I’ll go back to the old name. It makes no difference to the domain name that’s still http://rhysbaker.com/blog, I suppose it may affect RSS readers, I’m not sure. Apologies if it does.

Anyhow I’ve changed the name now and I’m sticking with it.

As for the colour and tone of the blog I wanted something pale and muted, a design were the text is still readable (maybe only just so) but does not distract from the images.

DIY Tilt Shift. Part 1

I guess what I’m trying to make here is something a bit like a ‘Lens Baby’ for a Canon 400D. I could just buy one I suppose but what would the fun be in that.

I teach Photography in a college and I mentioned to one of our caretakers what I was planning to do and that I needed some kind of coiled plastic, like a vacuum coil. He brought me this:

Perfect! Next step, what was going to be my lens? Fortunately, I have a few of these old enlarger lenses knocking about, I’m going to use the one with the ‘collar’ :

Next step, open the lens as far as it will go:

For the following part you need to calculate the focal length of your lens. Easy! You need a piece of white card and a spot light. Shine the light through the lens, move the lens up and down until the beam of light is sharp in focus. Measure the distance from the bottom of the lens to the card, if you have 3 arms this is easy, otherwise rope in a friend who can use a ruler. The focal distance here was 100mm :

The next bit is a little more complicated and needs some research. You need to find out the ‘flange length’ of your camera. This is distance from the front of the camera where the lens mount is to the surface of the sensor. I simply googled ‘flange distance canon 400d’ and good old google gave me chart with lots of cameras and their respective flange distances. The flange distance for the 400d is 44mm. Subtract this from 100mm and you get 66mm – this is length that my ‘bellows’ needs to be. So, I cut a piece at 66mm:

To attach the ‘bellows’ to the camera I’m going to use an old body cap, it needs to have  a hole cut in the centre approx the same size as the hose’s diameter. This proved a little more trouble than I anticipated. Get a drill and attack the thing, then file and sand to a smooth finish:

Right, end of part one. What I need now is some time to finish it off. That will be part 2.

To Be Continued…

126mm to 35mm

I was given this great little Ilford Camera, it’s 126 format, I was determined to make it 35mm…

There’s no take up spool, so I had to make one – super glue, wooden dowel, metal nut:

Next problem- there is no way a standard 35mm cartridge will fit in the left compartment. But I have a plan, first another metal nut, glued upper left:

Next step, I need the inside spool from an old film:

It’s going to be too big so I chopped off the ends. Then I discovered that the plastic was a fraction of a millimetre too thick so it need to be sanded down a little on either end:

The last bit was to see if the new part fits, it did!

Now the challenge is to load a film onto the new spool, definitely a darkroom job, and then seal the back of the camera. I’ll get back to you on this one…

Action Man 110 Camera

An ebay purchase that I’m yet to test (can’t find any 110mm film).

^ The lens is in his chest. Poor fella.

^ The film compartment in buried in his back. The shutter release is just below his right shoulder blade.

^ And the viewfinder is his rocket launcher thing. Just got to find some film now…

ISO 12800

OK, not the most inspring of subjects, but I took delivery of a 500D yesterday (I teach photography and we needed an extra camera for my students to use). I’ve never had a DSLR that shoots as high as ISO 12800 or one that shoots HD video. So far I’m mighty impressed, but now I’m certain that I want a 5D MK2!! If a cropped sensor can perform well, then a FF sensor must be knockout. I doubt that I’ll be finding out anytime soon though, the price of the MK2 is still high, although there are rumours of a 5D mk3 for next year so maybe the mk2 prices will come down to a managable level – ?

EDITING – the above files have had NR applied in Lightroom and a bit of Fill Light / curves adjustments.

DIY Large Format 8×10 Pinhole

^The basic ingredients, big box with lid (old photocopy paper box in this case), scissors, tape – parcel tape and electrical blackout tape, ruler, pencil, pens, black spray paint, drinks can, needle.

^Tape the box to make sure it doesn’t fall appart. I also used electrical tape on the corners and any potential weak spots which could leak light.

^Spray the inside black.

^The lens need to go exactly in the middle of one of the long sides (or the short side I suppose, but I’m using 8×10 paper so it had to be the long side). The ‘lens’ is a small piece of drinks can with…yep, a pinhole. Tape it down and seal the edges with electrical tape.

^The ’shutter’ is a simple sliding piece of card that fits underneath another larger piece – all very hi-tech.

^The finished article! The modeling clay on top is simply there to add weight. The 8×10 paper was blu-tacked to the inside of the box in the darkroom. So far exposures have been a little hit and miss, but in bright sunlight anywhere between 1 min 30 secs and 2 mins has worked pretty well.

Result No1. posted below

Large Format 8×10 Pinhole

Never tried large format pinhole before, this is the first result (this was a test, hence the slightly boring subject matter). Never made a paper negative before either. The ‘camera’ was built from a photocopy paper box- I took some images of it being made, I’ll post some later.

Sellotape Transfer

For the final result check here : http://rhysbaker.com/blog

The original image was taken in Whitby, in the window of a junk shop. I think it’s a figure of Marilyn Monroe.

^^ You need:
- Laser printout
- Sellotape
- Scissors
- Tray
- Warm water
- Lightbox

^^ Cover the whole of the image in the Sellotape

^^ Soak the Sellotaped image in a warm tray of water (you can see I have two on the go). Leave for 10-15 mins.

^^ With the image Sellotape side down, start to rub off the paper, this can take a while- be patient!

^^ Once I had (eventually) scrubbed all the paper from the Sellotape, the transfered image was placed on a Lightbox. The final image was shot with the G10.