Calotype No. 1

In 1979, I was attending college, majoring in photography. During my first photography course, we all got to learn about cameras and how they worked from the inside out by having to build our own pinhole cameras. Mine was the size of an ordinary box camera and we used cut 8x10 sheets of black and white photo paper as negatives. You could get four "negatives" from one sheet of paper. This is what is/was known as Calotype photography, first used in 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot.

The college had a darkroom the students could work in, so to be able to use your camera, you had to load one "negative" into your homemade camera, (in the dark, of course), and then about the only thing readily available as a subject was the college and it's surrounding area - it was located out in the middle of nowhere. I chose some cars in the parking lot, looking off in the direction of the nearest small town. When the picture was taken and developed, you had to contact print it to get your image. This image is actually one of the "negatives" I made 30 years ago, only just rediscovered. I have reversed it so that it becomes a negative image of what was originally a negative image. Now it's a positive image and looks essentially fairly normal. It also has the advantage of being one stage clearer, from not having to contact print it to produce the final, positive image.

Depending on the size of the hole you made for your aperture, you could get more or less detail. I remember experimenting and this image is an earlier shot when the aperture hole was smaller. Later pictures seemed to have lost a little definition, but gained a cool "vignette" effect on the overall image. Being an imprecise science, there is some distortion in this image along the right edge.