The first one was rather a disappointment, I knew the Harman Direct Positive Paper was contrasty, but did not expect such deep blacks, this was a sunny day. The developer I am using is Harman Warmtone at 1:9 dilution.
I did know that pre-flashing reduced contrast, so not having a suitable light source or anywhere to do this in the dark, I tried to pre-flash in-camera using the white diffuser on the Pinsta. See second photo. This was an improvement, but it was obvious that using this method caused a heavy vignette. Just doing a pre-flash in camera and developing (without taking a picture) made this obvious. 3rd photo.
So I decided to make a light source that I can use in a changing bag or my Calumet Film Changing Tent, the tent is better as it has more room. I was surprised at how dim the light had to be. The light source I used was an EL panel (https://www.earlsmann.co.uk/lighting-components/electroluminescent-products/el-panels/) Battery powered with a few sheets of ND filters and diffusing sheet. The 4x5 paper is placed on the diffuser and a switch is used to turn on/off the light. Remember when doing this to put all the other sheets back in the box before turning on the light panel!
To get the right pre-flash exposure, I followed the instructions for pre-flashing the paper on the Ilford website. I did a series of exposures with stepped exposures on a sheet. I took 4 sheets before I got in the right ball park. See the test strip photo. I picked the exposure that just started to move from total black, in this case 25 seconds.
The next shot was with pre-flash paper and the result was amazing. Photo below. So much tonal variation and no obvious vignetting, which really surprised me.
A quick process with lightroom and Silver Effex Pro 2 giving it a sepia tone gave the following result.
I am also very pleased with how the border turns out, different every time.
I also show a developed and pre-flashed image to show that it is just short of being black and it shows that the great border on these prints are produced during development in camera, where the camera body stops some of the paper being developed.
Wonderful 😃 Note: I did not even try to reduce the dust in these images, I think it adds to the charm.
Mike
This is really great work, thanks so much for this post and I'm sure it will help a lot of people and most of all I'm glad you're happy with the end result!
The DP is very contrasty indeed but in the right circumstances it can give really wonderful images. Using it actually makes you think about lighting in a completely different and more involved way I found... Fully sunlit areas will photograph much more evenly, it doesn't like shadows on a very sunny day...
As an alternative you can attach filtration to the light baffle slide, bluetack is best. The little old Ilford paper framed ones work great. Or you could use some less contrasty negative paper and do a contact print and then dev in the camera?
Oliver
Pinsta Camera
My first attempts at pre-flash were not so good. When I took my first photo I messed up. I tried to put the shutter disk in a 'Just before open' position while I got my phone ready to time the exposure but I accidentally went too far so it was letting light in for about 20 secs before I did the proper two minute exposure. Parts were exposed Ok and parts were too dark but it looked more like a light leak than a contrast issue.
I remembered in the Youtube videos that he had pre-flashed by pointing at a shiny bollard for 10 secs so I tried just pointing at the featureless sky for 10 secs but although it seemed to help the exposure of the land, it overexposed the sea (which was quite white because it was white-capped waves hitting rocks for 2 minutes)
I am almost tempted to merge the two in Photoshop but that kind of ruins the point of using Pinsta :-)
Yes, my washing was terrible and I suspect I may have put fingerprints on the first image while loading the paper. I am not going to build a technical solution to pre-flash in the bag so I will have to think about whether I can use some sort of grey card or see if I can use a translucent box to put the paper in and take it out of the bag for 10-25 seconds.