Hi all, Some time ago, a few of you asked aboput the status of this project. I've been quite busy since April 28, working on this and other priorities (including Luis' famous Postcard Exchange which finally got out late last week) , and I have not had much time to report. In a nutshell, it's worked beyond our expectations. We have a 12 1/2 feet wide by 8 1/2 feet high pinhole image of incredible beauty, probably one of the largest ever made in modern pinhole history. Thanks to the support of Wyndham Montreal, we were able to have a 10th floor room for the WPPD weekend facing one of the most impressive landscape of Montreal, right in the centre of the cultural area. We started setting up our equipment in the room early Saturday afternoon and worked to make the room completely light tight. By midnight we had everything pretty well completed, all we had to do was to lower the 3 strips of 50" by 8 1/2 feet photographic paper (kindly supplied by Ilford Imaging Canada as a full roll of 100 feet) down the frame we had built and open the shutter, to officially start our WPPD2 experiment. We chose a 40" focal length to get as wide angle as possible on the landscape (the image covers from Place Ville Marie to Place des Arts, with the Mount Royal in the background, for anyone familiar with Montreal). We did a bit of a "backswing" with the frame to extend coverage of the landscape on the side of Place Ville Marie. There was some question over what diameter pinhole to use. The optimal would have been 1.34 mm giving us F/755, much to small given the overcast weather expected for April 28. In the end, I chose 1.8mm diameter, giving us F/564. This is only a few minutes exposure even on paper on a bright sunny day, but under overcast conditions and with reciprocity playing its trick, I knew that this would be relatively safe. In the end, a snow storm forced us to close the shutter around 12:45 on Sunday, earlier than we had anticipated, in order to avoid a white out of the image. While the tests strips we had placed on the extremities of the frame suggested then that we might be underexposed, the centre, by that time was quite over exposed. I guess we had forgotten that we would experience very heavy vignetting with such a short focal length (further compounded by reciprocity failure at the extremities). By Monday morning we were all packed up and leaving the hotel to move on to the next stage: the processing of the paper negative. Given the facilities we were using, we couldn't get started until late evening and we also had to build handmade processing tanks (5 x10 feet) from 2x4 lumber and heavy gauge plastic. We used 100 litters of developer and fix (way too much in retrospect) to fill the trays and unrolled each strip of 50" x 8 1/2 feet into the trays, one after the other, out into a quick stop bath and then into the fix. The negatives were then washed thoroughly and installed back to dry on same the wood frame we had used for exposure at the hotel. The result was just astounding. Imagine a 12 1/2 feet by 8 1/2 feet negative image with incredible details in every areas of the image (you can count the number of chairs on a hidden roof top sundeck of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and see pretty well inside the buildings closeby, enough to count how many chairs there are around the desks or worktables). Every details of the architecture landscape are clearly visible in the image but strangely distorted in some areas of the image through wide angle expansion and in other areas through telephoto compression. Because of the length of the time exposure (a little over 12 hrs), the whole city looks unnaturally empty from the constant agitation surrounding this area as if it had been deserted from all its inhabitants after a major disaster. Only the buildings, the trees, the sign and lamp posts and the cars parked on the street are visible with incredible details. Very daunting. The next stage for us is to do a contact print of the paper negative into a positive image. This is the trickiest part and we are still working on tests strips. We need to illuminate an area 12.5 x 8.5 feet, and there is about 7 stops density difference between the centre of the image (closest to the pinhole) and the edges. At this stage, we are working with a single lamp projector 15 feet above the print and centred just above the zone of heaviest density. I let you imagine the fun of changing contrast filtration between each tests...! The goal is to avoid having to do any burning and dodging by carefully configuring the way the light spreads over the image and to make 11x14 tests strips each time we change the configuration. So far so good. We have substantially reduced the 7 stops gap between the centre and the edges, but the last stop and a half is really hard to tackle.... Once this is solved, we will do a practice run and then do the final positive print in 3 copies. That should take place before the end of the month if we can align all of our own individual schedules with the schedule of availability of the studio where we are working. The final outcome promises to be grand. Imagine, two gigantic prints from floor to ceiling extending almost 13 feet facing one another: one positive one negative of the same image and showing a portion of the Montreal landscape, rarely seen from all of us normally strolling on ground level, with details going down to the number of rails on the street sewer traps! Where next? First, we have to design frames that will hold prints that size and match their natural beauty and then find a proper gallery to host them. I would imagine we will show them first in Montreal. But I would also hope that they will travel to galleries outside the country, in North America, Europe of perhaps Japan. The toughest thing will be the find grants to support that stage of its infant history... So, in a nutshell, this is the story. I will undoubtedly post the image on the WPPD2 gallery, although it will only be a pale shadow of the real thing. In the meantime, I have posted an image of the negative on its drying rack with me on side as a way of gauging the scale of the image on the Pinhole members' gallery. Hope you enjoy, http://www.pinholevisions.org/discussion/upload/gallery2002.php?pic=guy2 2.jpg Cheers, Guy
