A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a beautiful handmade Vermeer wooden Pinhole camera, which, are handmade in Poland by Czarek Bartczak .I ordered one the moment I saw it. Pure impulse. I’ve never tried Pinhole cameras before. Nothing like going in at the deep end I thought. In the end I ordered a Vermeer 6×17 curved plane camera, which, exposes 3 6×6 frames at the same time on120 film making a panorama. You get four Images on a 120 roll film. Has an aperture of F/300 and a focal length of 90mm which given the negative size equals around 21 mm in 35mm format.

You have to supply your own take-up spool as the camera comes without one so if you are thinking of buying one don’t throw out your old 120 spools keep at least one. I had plenty lying around so no problem. Loading is just a question of feeding the film from one spool to the next over the curved plane inside the camera. Remember that this camera exposes 3 frames at a time. So when winding on you‘ll need to look for numbers 2,5,8,and11 through frame count window at the back of the camera.

For help with exposure I used an iPhone App Pinhole Assistant. I was able to measure the light and compensate for reciprocity failure* all in the app.
The shot here was a 10 sec exposure. To frame the shot I used a Leica 21 mm viewfinder but you can use your iPhone or just your eyes too. It’s part of the fun. It was shot on TMax 100 asa 120 film developed for 6 mins in Adox Adonal

 

Click on the image to see it larger

I can really recommend Vermeer cameras Czarek was a pleasure to deal with. I’m saving for another already :0)

 

Some Links

I purchased my Vermeer here

Reciprocity failure an explanation

iPhone App I use