>
> For my pinhole polaroid, I made a slot for the film with a light seel and
> a latch for releasing the the paper dark slide. I have had little success
> and run out of old polaroid (its a little expensive for trail and error stuff)
> Has any one else tried anything similar.
I use Polaroid with my pinhole cameras a lot. It's great material for
pinhole. I have not made transfers, but a lot ofpeople I know do it, and
why not use pinhole polaroids to start?
Why build a polaroid back when polaroid already made one that works really
well? You can easily build a pinhole camera around a standard 4x5 spring
back. This allows using any film delivery system the back will accept.
Graphlok backs are especially versatile. Backs can be found from repair
shops, or sometimes from the companies that advertise in Shutterbug here
in the US, such as Brooklyn Camera Exchange, KEH, etc. Various front ends
can be adapted, allowing the use of different pinhole "focal" lengths,
aperture shapes, or placements. Thus, you can get a lot of mileage out of
one back. Expect to pay anywhere from about US$40-75 for a back,
depending on type or condition, perhaps more for a graphlok. .
Polaroid film pack cameras are available from about $2.00 up at thrift
stores. They enable use of 6xx film pack materials. There are a lot of
these out there. The front end could be simply sawed-off and replaced, or
part of it could be sawed off, or one of my favorite tricks is to just
pull off the lens of a cheap plastic one like a Colorpack II and replace
it with a pinhole. It is possible, by taping over the electric eye
partially to fool the meter into interpreting the light it sees correctly
to give really good automatic exposures with the Polaroid ISO 3000 BW
film. You may have to set the camera to a slow film to outsmart it, like
the 75 color. Depending on the camera, this may put the exposure into a
longer time range; check and make sure it doesn't just put in a larger
aperture plate which would have no effect since you are supplying your
own smaller aperture with the pinhole.
Hope you find something useful here.
Larry Bullis ( lbullis@ctc.ctc.edu )