I like doing photographic experiments, crazy and not-so-crazy. My attitude with photography is rather loose and easy; I’m not at all dogmatic about photographic practice unless my preference for black and white film constitutes dogma. I figure why not explore the medium in as many ways possible to see what can happen. How are you going to know what you want to do if you don’t know what can be done?
I’ve done quite a bit of pinhole photography and over the last couple months have played around more with infrared film. So why not combine them? In theory (and with a long enough sunny exposure) it should produce something, right? Well, my five attempts so far have amounted to what the kids nowadays — in their kid-slang language — would call an “Epic Fail.” Two of the five shots (with 4×5 Efke IR820) I managed to salvage to some small degree with heavy post-processing to render them interesting enough to post on Flickr as experiments. In the right mood and frame of mind, I rather like them, but it’s hard for me to consider them simply scans of analog film negatives — they had to be extensively manipulated digitally to get to where they are (starting to sound like a dogma, huh? : extensive digital manipulation bad. Well, not exactly bad, removing the original analog photo even rather into the digital after scanning). The first was a 7-minute exposure with a .5mm diameter pinhole set at 185mm focal length:
Several Flickr friends really liked this (I cheekily call it “Pictorialism Edward Weston Would Hate”) so I’m glad to have not followed my gut instinct to trash it.
My latest attempt — despite increasing exposure to 10 minutes in even better sunny conditions — yielded an equally faint negative, barely visible. At first I literally thought there was nothing there to salvage and started to throw the negative away. However, I halted my gut instinct again and scanned and post-processed the image to get something I think is interesting but not great:
I call this one “The Midnight Blue Celestial Express (aka “Epic Fail”)”. Now, as images that don’t conform to what I had in mind, they are both failures, but of course any knowledge gained in an experiment renders the experiment as such a success. Failed images, successful experiments. The trick is to consider everything you do in life an experiment and then you’ll scarcely ever fail at anything.
I’m starting to think that perhaps pinhole infrared photos aren’t such a good idea, but I’m determined to produce a negative that doesn’t require Digital Rescue. Problem is, I’ll have to wait a while — there’s not much sun in the weather forecast for the rest of the week here in Nashville, Tennessee.
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