The camera and the film I found inside it.

Whilst cleaning the camera I opened it up and found that it still had a roll of film inside. The film label stated it was Ilford HP3 Panchromatic, which turns out to be a forerunner to the current HP5 film, first introduced in 1942 before being replaced by HP4 in 1965.

One of the snow drift shots.

I’ve never processed old film before, and at between 40 and 50 years old, this film was pretty damn old. However, google revealed that in similar situations, this type of film had produced decent results. Following the advice of others, I decided to develop the film in ID-11 for double the length of time stated for HP5 Plus (the modern equivalent of this film).

I was worried that the film would be brittle or that the emulsion would have crumbled off, but aside from being very curly and a little tacky, the film loaded and developed just fine. I think that double the time might have been too much, as the film came out very dark, but otherwise it was ok.

The house build in progress.

So, what was on the roll? Well half of it contained pictures of an extensio being built on a house, and the other half were shots of some deep snow drifts and trees. Not hugely exciting but interesting none the less. I’m going to contact the ebay seller and see if they want the negatives, I’ll also email them the hi-res scans that I’ve made.

You can see the whole set of images on my flickr account.

Anyway, I put it all back together and… I’m still getting the streaks. I’ve put black tape all over the metal scanning head to prevent reflections but still, I get streaked images. From this, I surmised that I’d some how managed to damage the sensor itself, most likely from handling it too roughly. Oh well, the scanner didn’t cost me very much, so I’d look out for another on ebay and use the sensor from that and all should be well.

So I got hold of another scanner (£10 this time!) and this weekend I dismantled it and put the sensor into the old scanner. Fire it up and… streaks. Dammit. I now think that the streaks are caused by my less than accurate modification of the plastic sensor housing – when I ground it down in to shape – I wasn’t terribly consistent. I think now that the streaking is due to part of the sensor housing letting more light in – throwing off the exposure.

I now have two options – grind down the already modified housing to try and even it out. Hopefully this will give a more consistent image. Option two is to modify the new housing in a more accurate manner – I’m thinking using a fine modelling saw and knife rather than grinding.

Grinding is really messy so requires working outside and nice weather – which I don’t expect much of as we enter October. But I’m loathe to hack at the new housing in case that isn’t the problem…

My first attempt at this was a couple of years ago when I took a HP Photosmart 1200 book scanner and thought to marry it with something like a Lubitel 166U to produce a self-contained, digital Lubi. Sadly this project came a cropper when it became apparent that the HP 1200 wouldn’t work without the light enabled, as it couldn’t complete its initial calibration step [Aside: Scanners calibrate themselves using a block of black and white lines under the scanner glass right at the edge of the mechanism's movement. The light has to be on for the scanner sensor to see this]. Now, I thought about ways to overcome this – fitting a switch to turn the LED off after calibration seemed the most likely – but put the project on hold to concentrate on other things. Sadly when I returned to it, it seemed that the scanner had been irreversibly damaged by my tinkering and nothing I could do brought it back to life. I’d like to give this another go, but I can’t seem to find another HP 1200 portable scanner anywhere.

Later, whilst reading Make Issue 14, I came across Michael Golembewski‘s article about building a camera from a Canon Lide scanner. These scanners are LED based and entirely powered by a USB port, so while they’re not self contained, they can be powered by a laptop so are fairly portable.

I got myself a LiDE 20 scanner from ebay for £15 and set to work. I first tried Michael’s instructions for a simple scanner camera. This requires no modification to the scanner – you merely make the box and lens assembly to sit on top. Sadly I got no workable results from this, due to the internal light overpowering any image. So I cracked open the scanner and got hacking!

Excessive vignetting due to shadow cast by sensor mount.

[Note: I don't have any pics of the build process but next time I open it to tinker, I'll stage some appropriate ones.] The scanner is very simple to open; there are no screws. Instead you simply peel up two strips of plastic on each side (held down with double sided tape) and then slide the glass out. This also means that when you put the scanner back together, a touch of duct tape will hold it in place. I open and close mine quite a bit while tinkering so this ease of access is a real boon. Now, I won’t go in to too much detail about the actual scanner modification, as you can read it on Michael’s site or in Make. However, I will say you really need to take the time to cut away the sensor housing to let more light in. If you don’t you end up with excessive vignetting.

Also, whilst I followed the instructions for masking the metal rod to prevent internal reflections, I still get a massive white line in my images. I’ll need to do more investigation into this, maybe I’ll spray the inside black.

Internal Reflections

I made the body of my camera out of good old black foamcore board and duct tape – two things no camera hacker should be without! Essentially, I cut a piece of board the size of the scanner glass, with a square hole in the middle. I then built a box open at both ends and one, that would slide over it, open at one end. These form the body and allow for focussing. For the lens, I used a magnifying loupe I had lying around, with an aperture made from black card that I taped over the loupe. I intend to build a better lens but this will do for now. I’m quite pleased with the results, aside from the reflection from the metal bar, and look forward to refining the design and taking it out and about. I’ll post more as I go.

Some sample shots:

I’m massively vain.

Moving whilst taking pictures produces some interesting effects

You can view my portfolio at gilespaterson.com

So why 120 roll film? Well, I wanted to make a pinhole camera that could take multiple shots, and I didn’t fancy just creating something like the dirkon 35mm pinhole camera.

I chose 645 format for the negatives because I wanted to make my pinhole camera as compact as possible. I personally prefer 6×6 square negatives, but that would have required a longer camera and possibly a slightly greater focal length.

Eventually I’ll get around to writing up the construction process in a bit more detail, but for now I’ll just say that the camera is made of 6mm thick, black foam core board. And is held together with PVA glue and black electrical tape. The shutter and red window cover are made of 3mm black card left over from mounting some photographs. The pinhole is made from a piece of aluminium cut from a can of Dr. Pepper and ground down with fine sand paper.

And now for some technical details (probably innacurate as I’m not 100% sure of the size of the pinhole):

Focal Length
40mm


Pinhole Diameter
~0.3mm


fStop
~f150


Film Size
60mmx45mm


Angle of View
~86 degrees

All these figures were calculated using the Mr. Pinhole website

• Canon AV-1 SLR
• Lubitel 166U
• Agfa Isola 1
• Lomo 135BC
• Houghton-Butcher Ensign 2 1/4B Box Camera
• Houghton-Butcher pocket carbine folding camera

Nothing fancy, mostly old, but I like ‘em all.

I intend to implement a nice little photo gallery on this site to show some of my photographs. However, I’m still playing around with some ideas at the moment so I don’t have anything implemented yet.

In the mean time you can take a look at my old photo gallery at http://photos.vurt.co.uk/ which are mostly just family snapshots. Also, I have a flickr account so feel free to head on over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/gpaterson/ to look at what I have uploaded there.