I bought a couple of pinhole cameras from Vermeer Camera, which arrived in late August. I presume the mule that carries postal packages across Germany went lame.
Although I took a couple of rolls of photos, I only got them back from the developers a day before we left to visit my mother–in–law’s tomb. Now that we’ve returned, I can properly examine the results.
First of all, I knew my technique is bad, but it’s worse than I thought. I seem to have made a mess at each end of each film. I need to be more careful with loading and unloading rolls.
Secondly, I have a scanning problem. The sweet little device I bought a while ago to scan 120 films works with the old banger cameras I had at the time, but doesn’t with the Vermeers—their negatives are simply too big. I had to plonk them on a normal office scanner, cross my fingers, and pray to Spes, the Roman goddess of Hope (whom I don’t believe in, not that that’s ever stopped her). These are the results. I suspect I have a scanner problem. I’m going to have to access a light table to tell whether these scans are correct, or whether I need to find a better way to scan 120 negatives.
Thirdly, though, I do rather like these results. To me, they have the feel of old photography, that from the beginning of the art.
I have a couple of rolls of colour negative to hand, which I’ll try out soon.
Incidentally, the manufacturer, Vermeer Camera, is not some mega corps like Nikon, it’s a Polish chap in his garage. The cameras are not made from some fancy supertechno electrogizmodery, they’re made from sycamore. They are weird and specialist. For example, all the moving parts are manual, so you literally slide a piece a wood off the pinhole to start taking a photo. The manufacturer is named, of course, for the great 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whom some experts believe to have used optics to aid his painting.
