Have you heard of a Pinsta Camera? It’s a pinhole camera that is built so that that you can develop your photos right inside the camera. It is a little bit like an instant camera except not quite so instant—more like a “give-me-a-few-minutes” camera. It takes direct positive paper, which means that the developed image is the print. One can use other papers or film, but direct positive paper is the simplest and just requires developer, fixer, and water.

A box of Ilford 4×5 direct positive paper has 25 sheets, and on a whim I decided I was going to teach myself to use this camera by doing a 25-day project, shooting one pinhole photo a day and no more until the paper was gone. It’s possible to develop while out and about so you can try a few exposures until you get what you want, but one a day sounded like fun to me.

I am up to day 22, and it has been a humbling experience! Out of 22 images, I have just a handful that I worked. The majority are underexposed or visibly show the distracted mistakes I made, mostly with the chemistry.

There are so many things to juggle with a pinhole camera and direct positive paper, even before developing. Direct positive paper is very contrasty, even preflashed (expose the paper to for a certain amount of time before taking the actual photo). The camera’s aperture is f/229 and the paper’s ISO is between 1 and 3, so even at midday, the camera requires a long exposure, and at other times, or when it’s rainy or you’re inside, it can require a really really long exposure. Sometimes I’ll set it up for a 20 minute exposure and the sun decides halfway through to go behind a cloud so I have to do math and guesstimate while the exposrue is happening. All the settings are manual (I use an app called Pinhole Assist to um, assist) and there’s no viewfinder. And more.

But I love it! I feel like I did when I got my first dslr 20-something years ago and getting it to do what I wanted was always a challenge. I love a challenge, and I am loving this one. Part of the challenge is the vulnerability of sharing my failures, so I’ll plunge right in and share a few of those. These were my first three days (from right to left), all underexposed. I was starting to feel discouraged.

On the fourth day, I took this photo of my house. I think the camera was out for an hour and a half. It was dark when I brought it in. It’s not great, but it’s much better than my first three days, and that was a relief!

A few days later I was back near Day 2’s (the middle photo in the group of three) location, so I decided to try again:

That is maybe my favorite of the 22 days so far, and you can see my ghost at the end of the kayak launch. The exposure was around 20 minutes, so I opened the shutter, walked out, and waited a while.

Day 3 was the clocktower in my village, and I have now tried 5 times to get that exposed correctly and still haven’t quite gotten it. The third in this set was a preflashing error. The last, which I took today, is still underexposed but almost there and I am ready to move on.

Here are a few oddities. The first is me on a swing for about 20 minutes. The second is an old kodak sign my Dad gave me and you can see how the direct positive paper reverses the image. The flowers used the oval pinhole option on the camera for a vignette. The final two are double exposures.

And some of my many failures: another preflash error, one where I must have left the shutter open without realizing it, and the list of went wrong that I know and didn’t know with the brown one is long. I couldn’t photography it like the rest because it’s basically a mirror:

A few more that worked pretty well (look for my ghost again in the second one):

Note: I see that some of the landscape photos are showing up as verticals, so you may have to click on photos to see the full image. Also, I don’t have a scanner so these were all photographed with my iphone, and the colors and contrast may be a little off. I tried to keep them consistent.

Anyway, this project has been inspiring! I’ve appreciated being forced to slow down and observe and to take things step by step. I have also appreciated getting more friendly with my tripod and my dark bag. Doing this has inspired me to dig out the developer tank I’ve never used. I hope to rectify that soon.

I have been trying out a second instagram account, @superiordewa, where I can get a little geekier about photography, and I’ve been sharing my pinsta camera progress there.