Slow walk to Silvertown, shooting Pinhole Polaroid 55.
All images in this post are 4x5 using a pinhole camera (no lens, just a pinprick sized hole in a shoebox sized container).
Polaroid Type 55 P/N (Positive/Negative) produces both a negative (rated about 40iso) and a positive print (speed rated about 80iso). It is great stuff, but at between $2 and $5 a shot, depending where you buy it, it can be prohibitively expensive. So the best bet is often to get a job lot of outdated film, reducing the cost to under $1/shot. Outdated film works just fine, for the most part, and you quickly learn to be highly suspicious of manufacturers claims of expiry. But occassionally, things do go funky. All today’s shots were done with film that expired 7 years ago. Above, in the ‘Slow’ shot, you can see the Type 55 negative has decided it would start to solarize on the bottom areas (solarization is the term used to indicate reversal of tones, theoretically blacks turn to whites, whites to blacks, in reality varying shades of gray).
The shot below is of the Thames Barrier in London. First the scanned negative, followed by a straight flatbed scan of the positive. This unpredictability is part of the appeal, and I feel it fits with the concept of pinhole photography.
The Thames Barrier is a movable dam, it was designed to raise up and block high-tides that may threaten London. In the 1980s it had to be raised about 1-2 times per year. It now has to be raised 10-20 times per year, mostly due to those chemicals our factories like to belch out. They are contemplating building a second barrier as this one will not do the job well enough in 20 years time.
Silvertown is not the prettiest part of London. Mostly industrial estates belching all manner of chemicals into the air, it sits in the Docklands between London City Airport and the Thames. Below, the fantastically named Standard Industrial Estate on Factory Rd.
