W/NW Self Portrait

Richard G said:
Peter that has a very professional finish. I like it. No-one could say it wasn’t taken by someone else with your M3 as a prop.
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Thanks Richard. I do recall that it took some experimenting. I had a mirror on the opposite wall, so I set up the M3 on a tripod and carefully focused it using the same M3 as the point of focus. I then had to align my face with the camera so it was the same distance from the film plane mark on the camera to the mirror and back again. I knew it would be a little hit and miss so I ended up taking multiple shots just in case. But it was a pretty effective technique as it turns out and most of the shots worked focus wise (though in some, my pose was not optimal for other reasons). I am pretty sure I stopped down to f4 or f5.6 for depth of field to help ensure sufficient focus accuracy. Years later when I had a flatbed scanner, I scanned the photos, converted them to BW and it was then just a matter of reversing the image in the horizontal plane to eliminate the image reversal caused by mirroring (e.g otherwise I would be wearing the watch on the "wrong" hand and face symmetry could be slightly off given none of us have perfectly symmetrical features.)
 
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^^ Very nice @Out to Lunch - this is perfect for the High Key thread :)

W/NW: High-Key...

I saw this beautiful photo in the RFF Gallery by @photony texas, and got me to searching for any high-key photos I might have in my library. I have none that I could find and did not see a dedicated thread to this subject. Anyone have any high-key shots they would like to share...
www.rangefinderforum.com www.rangefinderforum.com
 
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These are not the usual RFF photos. Yesterday I was at my friend Ethan’s shop, he has an online 3D-printing business called Cameradactyl, that’s photo-oriented and he was getting set up to host a UNM photo class the next day. One of the cameras he was going to use is the Pinholio, which is a self-developing camera. It’s just big enough to hold a piece of photo paper about the size of a 120 negative and features an internal slide shutter, so the pinhole cap can be swapped for a light-tight pour spout. We were doing the B/W reversal process that uses potassium permangenate/sulfuric acid bleach using regular photo paper.

Then I hit on the idea of “what if.” What if we rig up a bracket that I can wear, and the Pinholio points back at my face. So Ethan got busy with his knife, some cardboard and gaffers tape and we had our contraption made. I proceeded to do a number of these selfie pinhole reversal prints, I’ll share two here.

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The exposure times were about two minutes on both. The processing was: 1st developer about 2 minutes. Water rinse, 30 seconds. Bleaching agent about 4 minutes. Then open the camera in white lights, verify the negative image has been bleached and to fog the paper for the upcoming positive image. Clearing agent 30 seconds. Water rinse 30 seconds. Second developer 2 minutes, followed by final rinse. All the silver halides get used up so there’s no need for fixer.

These little prints are roughly medium format in size. A fun day!
 
JoeV said:
Here’s the contraption that Ethan made. He hit on the idea of mounting some of my previous images onto the cardboard bracket, to try getting a meta-selfie, but alas the angle of view of the Pinholio is a bit tight.

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You should post this one in the Kafkaesque thread.

It’s like something from “In the Penal Colony”.
 
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