Long long ago, actually quite far far away, I made a panoramic pinhole camera. If you ever doubted that a camera is just a light-tight box with a hole at one end and something photosensitive at the other, build a pinhole camera. The lenses, the detectors, the cool features are just add-ons. The basic idea hasn't changed since the first camera obscura was made hundreds of years ago. A pinhole camera is nothing but a handheld camera obscura with film instead of a white screen.
My panoramic pinhole started life as a film can for 50' rolls of TMax. I saved the cans, and one became my pinhole camera. It has a pretty wide field of view, hence the panoramic prefix. But, times change, people move, things get lost, and my pinhole camera long since disappeared into the ether.
So I made a new one! I had one more empty can, so I wiped it down, sprayed the inside with flat black paint, put a #80 drill through it, and called it good. A #80 drill is 0.303mm in diameter, and the film can is 100mm across. This roughly works out to f/300, or about 8.5-8.8 stops down from f/16. (This is an important number!) With ISO 100 film, an f/16 aperture requires a 1/100 sec exposure time. Run through the stops (you double exposure time with each stop) it works out to about a 3.5 second exposure. To be safe that should be doubled to 5-7 seconds to take care of the nonlinear reciprocity effects films have with exposures longer than 1 second.
I threw the camera and my TMax bulk loader into a changing bag, snipped off about 6" of film (I was short, and really wanted about 6.5"), taped it in place, closed everything up, and opened the bag. The loader went back on the shelf and the camera went outside with me. My daughter picked the vantage point and helped me count. We went with four seconds.
Film came back out the same way it went in. Camera and developing tank in the changing bag, film out of the camera and into the tank, seal everything up, open the bag.
My daughter and I developed the film together. It was her first time ever. It was my first time in about seven years. It was also a great way to test how light tight my changing bag and developing tank are, and to see if the new chemistry works before I put any 4x5 sheets into it.
It worked great! Considering TMax has a shelf life of a couple of years at room temp, and that this film expired a long long time ago, the picture came out great! And I'm all set to develop the 4x5 film tonight when the light isn't so bright.
I really do hope that film photography never entirely disappears. I know Agfa has stopped making film, as has Polaroid. Kodak is still producing film, as is Fuji. If they stop we really do lose something neat: the idea that a camera really is just a light-tight box with a hole at one end. But who knows? Maybe this just heralds the return to the earliest age of photography when people mixed their own emulsions, spread them wet onto glass plates, and took ten minute exposures before rushing the plates into the dark to develop.
Mmmm... I hope we stick with film for a while longer.
Tom
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