Box of parts

29 March 2023

Stumble upon this kit while looking through my study for something quite unrelated. Having recently assembled a cardboard version this wooden camera had been overlooked.

This is where email records come in useful, and after a little research it transpires that it was bought in March 2009 for £19.99 from Retro Photographic.

The Hole-on paper version was bought the following March for £16.99 from Magma Books.

It is interesting to see that Magma Books is still trading, having survived both Brexit and Covid. However it appears that Retro Photographic no longer trade, and their website domain is for sale.

The cardboard kit had required a roll film, which the user had to purchase, develop and process. By contrast, this wooden version is supplied with photographic paper, developer and fixer. These should provide a very different experience, especially as one of them has an expiry date of August 2010. This would have allowed a leisurely 18-month build originally, and the manufacturers were probably not anticipating a 14 year delay.

26 June 2023

It's Tom's birthday today. When Tom was 3 we holidayed at Rockcliffe in Scotland, and one of our days out was to the Camera Obscura in Dumfries. We were very familiar with this as our grandparents had lived in a flat just across the road, and we had often enjoyed the aerial views of doonhamers going about their daily business.

According to their website the obscura, formerly a windmill, is the world's oldest working example of this scientific instrument. It operates in a similar way to my camera kit - essentially a darkened chamber with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected.

As a further aside, Tom is featured atop the pony of 'Old Mortality', the stonemason Robert Paterson (1716–1801).

7 March 2024

It has been a year since that stumble, so time to step up a gear. Obviously the first step in any project is to read the safety briefing. As chance happens these safety notes all start with a letter from the word 'photography', providing the supplier with a neat acrostic.

8 March 2024

The next step is familiarisation with the equipment. The description below of the darkroom is a good example. The downstairs cloakroom seems ideal, as it has neither window nor TV to disturb the development process.

The kit provides a small sheet of red plastic, which taped around a torch creates the necessary safe light.

9 March 2024

Time for the build. The camera body is formed from MDF. Medium-Density Fibreboard is made from wood fibre combined with a binder and compressed. It is far different to the fine grained laser-cut basswood in some of the other projects, but quite adequate for the task.

The body can be glued together or just held with rubber bands, but it's probably better to go for the rigid option. One side piece is slightly undersized, so ensure the top surface is flush and fill in the gap at the bottom.

The inner box of black card is glued together and a hole created using the pin provided.

The shutter comprises a small section of MDF screwed to the front.

The final component is a sheet of clear acrylic. The purpose of this is to help create a positive print from the negative. A fresh photographic sheet can be placed over the negative, with direct emulsion to emulsion contact. The acrylic sheet is then placed on top and a short burst of white light creates the contact print. This is yet another variable that will determine the quality of the final product.

16 March 2024

It's a nice sunny day for the first trial. Decide to use the outside stone wall and mirror as a subject, as the reflections may be interesting.

Cover the camera in a black cloth, place the camera on the step ladder and open the shutter for 30 seconds.

Take the camera to the 'dark room' and mix both the developer and fixer at their specified 1:9 dilutions. This is not easy to do in a dim red light - realise afterwards that they can be prepared under normal white light!

It takes a long time to develop - about 5 minutes compared with the 30-90 seconds expected. This may be due to the photograph paper and/or chemicals being well past their best by dates.

Eventually an image emerges, so dunk it in the fixer and then the water bath before leaving it out to dry.

To produce a positive image requires a further step, but decide to adopt the same approach as in the review above by snapping it on my phone and then using image software to flip it horizontally and invert the colour.

17 March 2024

For the second test choose our summer house as the subject. This should provide a better profile for imaging.

Place the swaddled camera on the step ladder and expose for 30 seconds like yesterday.

This time only a vanishingly faint image appears after 5 minutes, which perhaps indicates that the developer has degraded further since opening. To create some sort of reaction pour another helping of developer into the tray. Unfortunately this rather gung-ho approach has a more dramatic effect than intended and the image thus formed is tainted by swirl of over-exposure.

After fixing, washing, capturing, flipping and colour-inverting the final image gives the appearance of an encroaching solar flare. Although accidental it looks almost deliberately creative.

18 March 2024

Finally repeat the summer house shot but using the developer at twice the specified strength, swirling it round to mix thoroughly.

An image emerges after a few minutes, so fix it and wash it. Under the white light the image has less contrast than initially appeared, but it is nonetheless recognisable as our summer house.

From a meteorological viewpoint the solar flare has now been replaced by a combination of fog and lightning - features that a phone camera may have missed!

This was the final test because the chemicals are clearly subpar. It has been an interesting exercise. There are many variables relating to timing, chemicals and procedures - to achieve pleasing results would require a lot of experimentation and preferably a dedicated dark room. There is only so long that one can monopolise the cloakroom without causing domestic dissent.

Even so, it is quite easy to obtain results nowadays.

Wikipedia states that Fox Talbot's early camera images required an exposure of an hour or two if something more than a silhouette of objects against a bright sky was wanted. The oldest existing camera negative is said by some to be of a latticed window at Lacock from 1835. I took a picture of the same window in 2017 using my Blackberry Priv mobile phone. William Henry Fox Talbot would have been amazed, and even more so had he seen the Virtual Reality exhibit that we took part in on the same day.