Darkroom Processes and Analogue Photography

The first pinhole camera I made:

This is my first pin hole photograph, shot using the Pringles can, and the positive of it made using Photoshop, rather than  darkroom  processes, because I couldn't get it to work in the darkroom.

This is the test strip and the failed positive.

I then moved on from shooting pinhole photography outside, to trying to get a good pinhole photograph inside. These were my first two attempts, using the Pringles can camera.

 This is an explanation of the second pinhole camera I made because the Pringles can leaked light through the lid, creating an over exposed semi-circle at the bottom of the photos.

I used this better pinhole camera to take photos inside, these are my first four attempts. The photo on the top left is the image I was trying to capture, but shot with my DSLR and turned into black and white in Photoshop.

This is my best negative from five attempts to get a good pinhole photograph inside. It was exposed for half an hour. 

 I then turned this into a positive in the darkroom and the result is below and is my final out come for pinhole photography.

Creating and using a pinhole camera sparked my interest in analogue and darkroom processes, so when I was introduced to the work of August Sander, for A2 Photography, and asked to take some portraits in his style, I decided to shoot them on film and shot an entire roll of just portraits in his straight on style  I used an old Pentax with a 50mm lens at f/2, which took nice portraits because the background was out of focus due to the shallow depth of field. I didn't trust myself to develop the film (what if I did something wrong and lost the whole roll?) so I sent it off to get it developed. However, when I got the negatives back, I created many prints from them in the darkroom.

The smaller prints, in groups of three are the ones sent back with the developed negatives. They haven't been created using the traditional darkroom methods, the negatives were scanned in and then the images were printed as these digital files. You can really tell the difference between these and the ones I printed in the darkroom. My prints (the larger ones in groups of two) are much softer than the scanned prints and they are true black and white (which unfortunately you can't really tell in these photos of my sketchbook pages, while the scanned prints are slightly sepia-toned.