Pittsburgh
I went to Pittsburgh over the weekend of August 28 to visit my friend Izzy. Usually when I visit Izzy, I bring a few thousand dollars' worth of photo gear, usually one Bronica and something else. This time, I took a Seagull WWSC-120 6x6 TLR and a Leonardo Super Wide 4x5 pinhole camera. Izzy wanted me to teach her about exposure, and I figured that it would be better to teach her with a couple of primitive cameras than with a gee-whiz 35mm like Izzy's camera, a Canon EOS A2.
The Leonardo Super Wide is simply a wooden box with a pinhole one one face that accepts standard 4x5 film holders. No ground glass or Graflock back here; the film holder is held in place by a couple of rubber stops. Most of my 4x5 backs fit on the Leonardo, including the Polaroid 545i back and my Calumet roll film holder. I know, I know, if I was a real pinhole photographer, I'd use an oatmeal box, but I don't really like roughing it; I just like to pretend that I am.
Izzy and I set out to shoot with the Leonardo camera, the 545i film holder (which cost more than the camera to which it was attached), and a pack of Polaroid T-59 color film. The Leonardo's aperture is f/150, so Izzy calculated an exposure for ISO 80 of about 3/4 second based on the sunny f/16 rule. (We deliberately did not bring a light meter.) I didn't know how to correct for reciprocity failure with T-59, so we went with 4 seconds in bright sunlight and used that to estimate the other exposures, up to 60 seconds for shade. We did pretty well; out of 20 exposures, 14 were good enough to put on the site. The photos exhibited a major, obvious shift toward blue. I assume that either the film was bad or that T-59 shifts toward blue with long exposures. There is also considerable light falloff toward the edges and corners.
The limitations of the Leonardo camera are obvious, but it's easy to overlook its advantages. One major advantage is that the Super Wide is really wide. Its focal length is 38mm, which is insanely wide for a 4x5 camera; 38mm on 4x5 is equivalent to 13mm on a 35mm camera. In addition to having such a crazy focal length, the Leonardo has infinite depth of field (no Scheimpflug movements needed), no barrel or pincushion distortion, and no susceptibility to flare. Another advantage of the Leonardo is that it can make cars and people disappear from any scene; the exposures are so long that anything that moves isn't recorded. Despite the fact that many of these pictures were taken in high-traffic areas, hardly any people are visible.
Compared to the Leonardo, the Seagull is a much more conventional camera. It takes surprisingly good pictures as long as you keep the lens stopped down, and while the fit and finish isn't so great, the camera is at least solid. It is a much easier camera to use that my Lubitel if for no other reason than it advances the film and cocks the shutter at the same time!
Take a look at the photos (click them to enlarge them) and let me know what you think.
Seagull Photos
Izzy preparing the shoot with the Leonardo Super Wide pinhole camera. The
camera is very shallow due to its 38mm focal length. We didn't bring a
tripod, so we had to put the camera on something solid for each exposure.
Izzy shot this photo of a tricycle on a porch. I like the very straight
verticals! Izzy calculated this exposure by using the exposure guide on
the back of the camera.
I shot this one. I think that I used sunny f/16 for it.
Pinhole Photos
This was the first photo we shot. (Well okay, it was the second, but the
first was one of the five duds.) The subject is the back of the apartment
building next to Izzy's. There's trash in the foreground because the
camera was perched on a dumpster.
These photos were taken around the University of Pittsburgh campus. The
first photo shows the Cathedral of Learning from atop a newspaper vending
machine across the street. In retrospect it would have been cool to have a
picture of the Cathedral from near the base, but that picture is so overdone
that I just wasn't inspired to do it, even with my megawide camera.
The second photo was the result of Izzy's trying to shoot a picture with the camera sitting in a flower bed. There really wasn't enough light to pull it off, and the camera wasn't steady, so there's considerable blur. Still, the photo looks neat.
Izzy also shot the third and fourth photos. The third photo just shows some new dormatories at Pitt, but is well-exposed and has nice verticals. For the fourth photo, Izzy put the camera on the ground. I had never thought of doing that before, but the resulting photo is pretty cool. If you look closely, you can see a yellow dot in the middle of the sunburst, which I assume is the sun itself.
After hanging around Pitt, we went to the Phipps botanical garden. These
two photos were taken by myself on a bidge on the way to Phipps. The
second photo has the sun in it again, and this time it has apparently caused an
odd diffraction effect. It looks as if different bandwidths of light are
diffracted at different angles.
These photos were taken around Phipps. I shot the second (horizontal) one
and Izzy shot the other three. For the first photo, Izzy positioned the
camera on a ledge about four inches from the plant. The blurs in the
center background are other Phipps visitors. The last of the four is the
photo that Izzy was taking when I shot the photo of her with the Seagull.
I decided to take advantage of the Leonardo's infinite depth of field by setting
the camera down on the sponsor bricks. Neither of these really came out
the way I wanted it to. In both cases the most prominent subject is the
brick walk rather than anything else. In the second picture, although the
light in the center (which is in the shape of a frog) was only about 2 feet from
the camera, it has receded into the distance.
This was one of the last photos that I took. The camera is sitting on the
grass, pointed up toward the tree.
Last updated November 19, 2001