Color pinhole photos. I think I really like them.
Pinhole photos are traditionally Black and White. Photographers have made pinhole photos with either BW film or BW photo paper for eons. The process is well-documented and is a stalwart of photography student courses. BUT…..while I like BW photos, some subjects really, REALLY deserve color.
In the sleepy little town of Apalachicola, Florida, there is a tiny water park and playground that was obviously the brainchild of someone in the past. It’s behind a school and next to a now-closed day school. I found this location by just driving around early one morning. The lot is overgrown. The poor water umbrella and the shower heads are all starting to rust in the moist, warm Florida salt air and weather. As I walked around, I had several cameras with me, my Olympus EM1 Mk2, Olympus EM5 Mk1 Infrared, and a Reality So Subtle 6×6 film pinhole. I saw these subjects and had a roll of Kodak Gold 200 color C41 film which I thought would be perfect. While I also got some lovely Infrared shots, this possibility of color pinhole struck me as possible.
I took the shots below with the 6×6 camera on a table-top tripod about 2 feet from each of these structures. The film sat on my shelf for a couple of months while I got up a batch of 3-4 rolls to send to The Darkroom in California for processing. I tend to batch them up to spread the shipping costs out across multiple rolls. I get the rolls processed and returned un-cut.
When these came back, I was immediately taken with these four in particular. They’ve were scanned in on my Epson V850 and had a few tweaks in Lighroom’s AI removal tool to obliterate some power lines and a few ugly distractions. Otherwise, they didn’t have a ton of manipulation. The sky and clouds were lovely that morning and really suited the subjects.
I showed these to several photo friends who are digital shooters and some family members, and the first comments were: “They’re kind of soft.” LOL. Yes, they were taking with a lens-less camera, so that’s part of the image. In particular, my digital friends wanted to crop them, sharpen them, crop them, undo the vignette, change the colors, etc……….Again, very LOL. Those aspects of pinhole photos are EXACTLY what I wanted. They shouldn’t be sharp. They should be vignetted. The subject is exactly the size I wanted; to remove the vignette would destroy my vision.
So what are these photos? Are they portraits? Are they studies in color? Are they a documentation of abandoned places? Are they showcases of a very low-tech process? I think all of the above. I hope that viewers see them and imaging this place. I’m not 100% sure that the one of the red trash can belongs with the others, but it was at the same location taken the same morning, so it gets included here as something a bit different rather than another portrait of another item.
