I went out on a sojourn last weekend, and, well, I grabbed the pinhole. Why? I don’t know. What did Scrooge say? “An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” As good an explanation as any. I wandered a bit and found myself in Manteno along the old Illinois Central mainline, now a part of the Canadian National.
Besides, I had just received my order of LPD developer from B&H, and I wanted an easy project to get things going again in the darkroom. I’ve been stalled a bit since the start of spring on darkroom projects; too much else going on. The last couple of years I’ve been using Ilford Multigrade developer that comes pre-mixed and then gets diluted to a working solution. It’s a nice developer; I can easily adjust the mix to suit the contrast, and it lasts well in the tray for what I’m doing. In the tray, I’m less concerned with time than with how many prints I can process. But, and it’s a big but, the stock solution has very little shelf life before oxidizing. I searched it out; I can refrigerate the open bottle- my wife would love that- or I can blow in canned air to remove the oxygen to stop the oxidation, or I can do both. Or maybe I just change developers.
My solution is to go back to a developer I’ve known for 40 years, LPD. Funny, it’s in the name; LPD stands for Lasting Paper Developer… go figure. It’s reported to last up to 2 years as a stock mix, not something I’ve ever tried, but it sure lasted at the school darkroom. I’m hoping for more than the few months I had with the Ilford developer. And it worked nicely, just like I remember it. The only other wrinkle right now is that the cold water temperature coming in off the street is 77 degrees. Normal for this time of year, but that’s just a bit too high for me. Time for some ice. So many analog issues.
The camera I’m using is a Leonardo Pinhole camera I bought at Calumet many moons ago. It has a laser-cut pinhole that gives f/250. The camera has a 3-inch draw, which converts to 75mm for the 4×5 format, and no viewfinder, so framing is a bit of a guess. But then again, there is no focus either, so you just roll with the easy nature.
Pinhole 4×5 with paper negative? f/250, ISO 6 with a 2-minute exposure… Yes, I stepped in for a selfie. Amazing how long two minutes feels when you have to stay still and stare at the same spot while people drive by.
My exposures ended up being a bit over, or I didn’t get the developer temp down far enough… or maybe a bit of both. On my next trip, I’ll use a spot meter. I used an incident meter on this trip and did the exposure adjustments in my head. Most of my meters top out at f/90, and I have to convert to f/250. That’s the other thing to add: a small notebook and a pencil.
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