This week’s trip with the Reality So Subtle 6x6F pinhole camera was to Berwick upon Tweed, which sits near the border between England and Scotland and is famous for having changed hands between the two countries 13 times, most recently in 1482.

I decided to try Ilford Pan F+, rather than my usual FP4+, in the camera, with the aim of increasing the exposure times by a little more than double. The results were OK but I had to boost the shadows in Lightroom more than I expected. More experience is needed before I decide whether to use Pan F+ in the long term.

All of the images below have had a Sepia toning preset applied in Adobe Lightroom

My last set of pinhole images, from Blyth, attracted some favourable social media comments on the composition and framing, considering the guesswork involved in composing without the viewfinder. I think this lead me to be a bit over-confident with the framing on this outing, and I ended up not including everything I wanted to in two of these images.

Clearly the lighthouse has lost it’s top in the above image. The only way I would have been able to include the top, would be either (a) move further back – but I’d already done that in the first image, or (b) tilt the camera up, which would have created some distortion. In hindsight I should have taken one image with the camera tilted up, to complement the version shown, so I could compare the two.

The other lesson is that the sight lines etched on the camera are quite accurate, so if it looks like the view is too narrow, then it really is too narrow !

I hadn’t seen this driftwood boat before, and really like it. It was created by Lee Mace and makes a good foreground to the Royal Border Bridge, which carries the main Edinburgh-London train line over the River Tweed. I had hoped to include a ghostly image of a train going over the bridge; I gave up waiting after 20 minutes and of course a train appeared just after I packed up.

I tried to get the full width of the driftwood boat in the image below but this was another case where the image wasn’t quite wide enough, unless I moved further back. I did move about 3 feet away from the boat but that has produced a lot of vegetation on the foreground and the boat looking a little hidden it its’ surroundings. The Ondu 6×12 view might have been a better bet, if I had it with me.