We went to Nunhead Cemetery to take photos with the Zero 2000 pinhole camera.
I’m amazed at the results!
I have to get my head round the long exposures though! As usual, the cemetery is bright sun (huh?) and deep shade. The first place I metered needed a 27 minute exposure. With those sort of times you need to be alone with a book, tis a bit much to ask the partner and/or dog to hang around that long. Now I know why people build pinhole cameras out of coke cans, you can leave them and come back after lunch.
With these conditions I was averaging 3 minutes per exposure and that was doing my head in. Even 3 minutes seems an insanely long time to be exposing film to light, and it seems even longer looking at the stopwatch on my phone!
I should trust it though. This was the first time using the Zero 2000 ‘in anger’ so I will get used to it in future.
A cemetery is a natural place for pinhole photography, if perhaps a little cliched. Most of these images need to be clicked on (to enlarge) to do them justice.
This double exposures (above and in the top photo) were intentional I’m happy to say.
Something that is probably obvious is the angle of view, ie low. This is because I can’t be arsed to carry a tripod so I only had a Manfrotto 210B/ME10 table-top tripod. It is a sturdy little beast with a ball head but it is only about 10cms high. Which is not high at all. Fine if there is a gravestone handy to rest it on, but otherwise it is on the ground. I hadn’t realised how wide the pinhole is, so I captured a lot of foreground in some of the shots. I’ll know better next time.
A couple of rolls of FP4 took over an hour to expose. I also had the Super Ikonta with me, so from the super-soft and dreamy we are jolted into the relatively sharp.
I took a shot of these NZ gravestones before with a reflected light meter and they were all blown out. This is a whole lot better. And very sad too.
The cemetery is full of angels, natch:
One of the big draws for me is the ramshackle nature of parts of the cemetery. Some corners look like my children’s bedrooms used to when they were younger, only on a monumental scale:
All souped in Rodinal for 16 minutes, FP4+ exposed at 100
by skinnyvoice
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