Pinhole Swap 2001
Self
portrait: Richard Heather
The place is Los Osos Oaks State Reserve, Los Osos, California.
These stately trees were about to be bulldozed for a mobile home park when
an elderly lady threw herself in front of the dozers and refused to let
them pass. One tree still had a Spanish cross blazed into the bark. The
Spanish came here in 1768 and killed all of the grizzly bears to feed the
starving mission in Monterey
Photograph taken with a home-made
pinhole camera. 
The camera is a cookie tin 10 inches in diameter and
4 inches deep. The film is Tmax 400 8x10. The edges fold upward at the
corners like the photo in the image. Focal length is 4" at center to about
6" at the edges. The pinhole is homemade in brass shim. I don't know the
size (as small as I can cleanly make). The exposure is 45 sec with a very
wide range of light values from deep shadows to bright overcast sky. The
camera does not have an up or down and I did not mark the orientation of
the film. The camera was propped between the legs of a tripod and the roots
of the great tree. I moved to a place of dark background for most of the
exposure. The film was developed in Rodinal 1:40 for 8 min. The negative
was printed on Ilford MGIV fiber base with a split filter exposure:
high contrast in the shadows and low contrast in the sky. The print was
then scanned and printed with an Epson printer on heavy- duty matte
paper. The ink jet prints look better than the silver prints because the
dark edges have been removed to show the circular image.
Richard Heather, 2001
Here are other images taken with a Leonardo 4x5. It was hard for me
to get in to some of the pictures.
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