Madtown Matriculation

Last Saturday at Photo Midwest in Madison, four gracious, enthusiastic, cheerful photographers and I built a 30mm, 90-degree angle of view, 6x6cm Populist, and used it to take photographs. I really learned a lot.

After everyone chose from the materials I had provided for the exterior of their cameras, I was pleased I could make a political statement with my choice. Not a really bold move at an Arts organization in Madison, but it felt good.

Everyone made a light-proof camera that advanced film smoothly, drilled a pinhole within hundredths of a millimeter of the optimal .23mm on the first or second try and successfully exposed a roll of film. 

I didn't take any pictures of their cameras or get scans of their images. If anyone has posted pictures online, please email me a link and I'll edit it in here.

There were a few notable surprises. 

When discussing determining exposure from the table I provided, someone brought up Pinhole Assist, and they all installed it on their phones.

There were older Paterson reels in the darkroom, which have a wide platform to guide you into the slot and are really easy to load. On the more recent ones like mine, it is barely wider than the edge and tough to find in the dark with floppy 120 film. Why'd they change that?

Three of the participants were experienced analog photographers, two of whom were alternate methods workers. The fourth was the daughter of one of them who had been listening to her mother talk about photography for a long time. When we were ready for development, we couldn't find any Rodinal that I had planned for, but there was a bottle of HC-110. I went out to check the Massive Development Chart for dilutions and times, and when I got back, they had found a jug of D-76 and decided to use it straight for the shortest development time. By the time it got around to me, there was only 300ml left, so I did mine at the more common 1:1 dilution. I haven't developed film in D-76 since graduate school in the UW-Stout gang darkroom.

There was a small communication breakdown. No one was around to explain how to use their scanning workstation, and there was at least one critical problem with each of the three methods available.  I tried with Negative Me on my iPad, but handheld without a solid stand, it wasn't feasible either. Unfortunately, we didn't get to edit and have a conversation about the photographs.

However, we did gather around the light table and look at the negatives. 

It had been a very sunny day, and other than the overall density of the negatives we expected, one thing immediately caught our eyes. There was a set of negatives that looked like increasingly wide views of the inside of the shutter. 



It was initially puzzling until I was handed the camera and could hear the pinhole mount sliding back and forth inside. When fallen all the way against the back it was imaging quite a bit of the back of the shutter.  I know I mentioned taping the mount in place, but it's impossible to be sure everyone has heard when they're concentrating on a task. I'll make sure to check that in future. Strange this hasn't happened before. The warping is from the film slightly spooled out into the image chamber, which from our conversations, she probably likes.

n.b. These look like really interesting pictures that would probably polish up well with a decent scan and a little editing.

I handed out tripods, but kept the $30 generic tripod with aluminum legs and a plastic head with a sort-of three-axis adjustment. Because it doesn't take much to support a three-ounce camera, I bought one to see if it was usable. The legs and their locks were quite good, but the plastic head is a mess. It has, not particularly smooth, different, separate locks on each axis that need to be released and retightened. Even the crummiest ball and socket mount I've had was more flexible and easy to position. The elevator has a stiff crank you have to wind, with a different type of lock. I prefer a lock that just releases the elevator, and you can just pull it up and down.

But its mortal sin is the side-to-side axis only tilts one way and pressed down to its limits, where the camera's supposed to be level, it's still about three degrees off. Not being able to tilt both ways is bad, but this is really irritating. You can level it by adjusting one of the legs, but after you struggle with the head, that will probably have to be redone. One nice thing about the square format is it doesn't matter if the camera is horizontal or vertical, and the tilt platform does go just enough past vertical to level the camera that way. Several years ago, I changed the sliding shutter from coming out the top to the side after a few incidents when gravity closed the shutter before I had planned. Notice where that rotation leaves the shutter handle.

When everyone was practiced, loaded and ready, I got distracted by something, and when I looked up again, they were all gone. So I set out on my own. We had agreed to meet again in an hour and a half. In some previous workshops, I had left three hours to expose a roll of film, but everyone kept coming back in an hour. For me, that's really a rush, and I acted like it.

Photo Midwest's facility is in a suburban business/industrial park. Across the road is Exact Sciences, a gigantic molecular diagnostics laboratory. The road forms a low valley with the building up a slope. Frustrated without a rising front to control converging verticals, I put the tripod up on a low wall and extended it as far as I could reach. After struggling with leveling it and having a stupid problem with a rubber band in the way, I thought I had accidentally opened the shutter. It turned out I hadn't and advanced past an empty frame. I repeated the process. On the bright sunny day, the exposure measured a third of a second. I was particularly careful to wave my phone away from the pinhole and back as fast as I could (I had forgotten to take one of the black cards). The misplaced rubber band also got in the way closing this second exposure, and I wrestled to get it and the tripod situated without an errant exposure or falling over. I forgot to wind the film. My next exposure was from the driver's seat of a forklift. The very light tripod was again difficult to use in one of my leaning-against-something-with-one-leg-extended arrangements to get to the angle I wanted, and it seems it eventually worked. Looks like I was pretty good at keeping that first exposure short because you can barely see it.

Nearby, behind a meter-high retaining wall, was a flat plane with an enticing set of contrasty pipes in the corner. They were a little farther than I would have liked but I went ahead, again using the wall to get a higher viewpoint. After a similar struggle, I discovered gravity had done the deed while making the last adjustments. This was quite a dense negative, but not as bad as I thought at the time.

Where I was standing, it sloped up slightly to where the wall was low enough to climb over. I got a little closer and, with most of the adjustments already done, got the photo quickly. Paranoid that sirens were about to start going off, I jumped back over the wall and forgot to wind the film. A little farther down the building was a set of pipes with shiny brass valves. I had used the trick of rotating the camera to make it level before, but this one, I did with the camera horizontal so the two exposures are rotated 90 degrees from each other. 

Finally a picture I intended to take. The slope of the hill was in the right direction to use the tilt adjustment for a level image. This is another picture that triggers my pareidolia. Give me two side-by-side shapes with a vertical and then a horizontal line below, and I'll see a face. This one looks a little confused by the shadow falling on it.

I returned to Photo Midwest worried that someone might have had a problem and had gone back for my help. I've always avoided elevators for the exercise and am often taken with how the space is defined by the light in a stairwell. You also usually don't have to worry much about being interrupted during a long exposure.

Showing off the famous depth of field of pinhole.

Out the stairwell window, showing off how wide the camera is.

While making the cameras, we got into a conversation about two approaches to pinhole. One is based on how amazing it is how you can take such good photographs with the simplest of devices, and the other prizes the uncertainties in exposure, camera support, vignetting and long exposure to create ghostly and dreamy images. Here are two exposures representing those two camps.  Down the hall from the classroom is Photo Midwest's gallery, at this time featuring photographs done by a camera collector, each done with a different camera. There was another battle with the cheap tripod, with the gravity-assisted shutter falling open during most of it and while retrieving my phone from the other room to measure the exposure. This is an incredibly dense negative, but an image can be retrieved with a 16-bit grey scale scan and the Levels tool.

The same scene with a stable camera and the measured exposure. 

People were arriving back now, so for my last frame, I quickly set up this oddly composed close-up of a Brownie and half a Stereo Realist.

Thanks to all the participants and especially to Wendy Murvke, Programming Coordinator, who did all the administration and acted as a willing foil to my requests to keep a spreadsheet of my comic mistakes. This would be interesting to do again in the fall. Get in touch with Wendy and let her know if you're interested.

The Canadette has a hand-drilled (live in front of five people) .25mm pinhole 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film was Kentmere 400.

Workshop rehearsal & choices

In about a week, I'll be conducting a workshop in Madison, building a Populist and exposing a roll of film with it. One of the instructional strategies I favor is rehearsal, such as dry fitting parts before covering them with glue or taking a camera only loaded with backing paper, then previsualizing, viewfinding, adjusting your tripod, and winding as though it were real film. Taking my own advice, I tried out a few things, also to reassure myself that it's all going to work.

We're going to make a 30mm, 90° angle of view, 6x6cm Populist. What a lot of people think of as the "look" of pinhole photography is actually this sort of extreme wide angle view. Easy to do with pinhole, but until recently was very expensive to do with a lens, although my iPhone can match it now. In case the weather is overly gloomy, it's fast for pinhole at f130. It's also a brain bender to previsualize practically your entire field of vision as a 2D photograph without an optical viewfinder. Letting people choose an angle of view ended up being a little confusing in previous groups. 

I made the camera in under two and a half hours. It's pretty straight forward, especially with premade workshop parts. I got four pinholes in the appropriate range out of five. I'm always impressed how easy it is to make a camera that's as good photographically as any you can buy. Give it a coat of Liquitex and it's almost as durable.

One of my objectives was to decide on a developer. Because it takes over an hour, my beloved semi-stand developing method isn't an option, so I needed to experiment with normal agitation.  

I like the idea of caffenol, which is mixed from supermarket ingredients, for it's "maker" vibe and low impact on the waste stream. We could mix a bucketful at once, but then everybody would have to be ready at the same time. It takes 15 minutes to develop. The other option is Rodinal 1:25. The liquid stock solution is immortal, it mixes instantly, and you can use it at high dilutions, although we don't have time for that. This dilution is only seven and a half minutes.

The conditions for taking photographs might range from interior lights to brilliant sunshine. For film, I had already chosen Kentmere 400, for its speed, economy, wide latitude and what Ilford claims is the same reciprocity profile of other Ilford films - just one and a quarter times the measured exposure longer than a second (that is, almost always for pinhole photographs). 

Another thing I was concerned about was overexposure in bright conditions. Waving a black card in front of the pinhole with a human hand takes almost a 1/3 of a second, which is overexposure on a sunny day. I was pretty careless about doing short exposures with these two rolls to check that out.

The EyePA 30 got the caffenol assignment. (One doesn't have a favorite camera, right?) I had always heard that caffenol might cause base fogging in ISO 400 films. There was a post on the caffenol blog about ISO 400 film that recommended the STD recipe, which doesn't use any restrainer like potassium bromide or salt, which I've seen previously specified for fast emulsions. I used that formula and the negatives look pretty normal to me.

Off to Lake Winnebago to see what the ice is up to. In the morning, on the west shore, it's a challenge to keep the sun from shining on the pinhole with this wide-angle a camera. Here, using the trick of putting the camera in the shadow of a tree branch.

Tilted down a bit to get under the sun.

The ramp out to the ice on Merrit Avenue is closed, so people are hauling their huts right over the beach.

This hut with the wheels on the sides shows the holes in the bottom. I think the round ones are for fishing and the rectangular one for sturgeon spearing season, the size of which is specified by the DNR.

The lake ice was pretty thick, but here at the end of Ames Point is some open water.

Looking back north along the breakwater.

When the ice finally breaks up, huge shoves usually accumulate on the Yacht Club harbor wall, but there's not much now.

Two weeks later, I again set out to finish the film. I got to the railroad tracks just as a train was approaching so I rode around the block and found these brilliant white doors in the sunshine,

There was still ice, but getting very thin on the lake. Most of Miller's Bay was open water. There was a group of stalwarts still fishing toward the more protected south end of the bay.

A clear spot which was the site of the Polar Plunge a month ago.

Grrrrr! Only 10 pictures. Two were ruined when the shutter came open pulling the camera out of my pocket. Additional resistance has been added behind that shutter handle.

So the new Woven Wheats camera came out of the other pocket.  This roll was developed in Rodinal 1:25.

Walking down the dock, I noticed this odd scene in the ice. There's a clear layer of about 10cm at the top, then foggy but translucent for another 10cm. There are random clear holes through which the bottom is visible. Echoing the shapes of the holes are rings of bubbles at the top of the ice. This was also a challenging camera support situation. The tripod legs were completely extended but folded flat lying on the dock. The camera was extended as far as I could reach, and I was sitting on the tripod or it would tip over onto the ice. Surprisingly, I got the shutter opened and closed without moving the camera.

The pine trees still on the ice that used to mark the roads and cracks seemed to echo the small rock placed on top the boulder.

My intention was to capture the unusual vertical ice shove just off shore, but this time the angle to the sun was perfect to capture a reflection off the edge of the pinhole.

One of the former freight doors on the track side of the old train station. (Guilty admission: no rising pinhole on this camera, but you can accomplish nearly the same thing by cropping off the bottom.

Another composition determined by the need to keep the verticals parallel without a rising front, this time with the whole negative. It's hard to avoid including the camera's and your own shadow in the foreground when facing away from the sun this early with such a wide angle camera. Recently, I read a comment by RSS's James Guerin where he praised YouTuber Will Gudgeon for including his shadow in an image. Looking at that shadow for a while, it almost seems like you're viewing me from behind. Interesting bit of hand waving to make the exposure as well.

Et tu, Brutalism?

Riverside tables and chairs in a winter jumble.

I should probably check with some dimmer light to see about that reciprocity adjustment.  Diffuse light in our north-lit bedroom.

A sunbeam on the soap dish.

Sun beams in the Sunroom.

Very close up to a new cactus in the kitchen window. I didn't quite capture its translucence. The pinhole must be OK, because the screen is well resolved if you zoom in.

More north light on the dining room table.

Once again, I'm impressed how nice, light and easy to use the Populist is. There are a lot of weird and marginally balanced things I do with the tripod you'd never get away with using a heavier camera. Knocking over your Hasselblad is going to be an expensive tragedy. I'll bet I did it four or five times with these two rolls and the cameras are unmarked.

There doesn't seem to be much difference in the two developers. Those sunny scenes are pretty dense negatives but there wasn't much heavy blocking up of highlights. I may wait until the last minute to choose. If participants come back early for developing, we can take the time for the caffenol, if we're rushed, Rodinal would save a few minutes.

Both cameras have hand-drilled .23mm pinholes, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame.

There's still room in the workshop if you're available on March 22nd.

No Audio

 

After making Hughie from one-pound chocolate boxes because the dimensions were perfect for a medium format stereo camera, I noticed the box from my AirPods in the potentials pile in the basement. I had observed its useful height earlier, but it wasn't wide enough for the standard "film roll-image chamber-film roll" arrangement for a 6x6cm format camera. This time it occurred to me to make a Compact Series style film holder with the film rolls tucked into the space under a triangular image chamber. It justifies the use of two clichés: it's a really good box, and pinholers view every container as a potential camera.

A title for the blog post came immediately. When I was hired to start a centralized Audio-Visual department at Knox College, the grant funded a half-time graphic artist. Mike Ireland, a watercolorist, got that job. I had also begun teaching Photography in the Art Dept. About a year into our department's existence, we got invited to exhibit our work in the main art gallery on campus. Because we both played guitar and made up AudioVisual Services, we thought it would be funny to title the show "No Audio." It was the first thing I thought when I decided to make the totally silent device.

Now, I have to make it into a camera. Despite the box's proximity to the size necessary, there were several irritating customizations. 

I had intended to make the counter shutter internal like the shutter on the front. After first drilling the winder holes in the three-layer cardboard top of the box, I realized they would have to be modified if a 3mm shutter was glued inside the back. Also, I had really made a mess of the hole in the back for the counter but was pretty proud of the neat holes in the top and didn't want to rework them, so I made a conventional exterior shutter out of the side of the box the Apple TV came in (not that good a box).

It's 40mm from pinhole to image plane. A 73° angle of view, getting heretically narrow for pinhole. The .28mm pinhole was repurposed from last year's stereo solargraphic project.

It follows the basic scheme of the Compact Series of a film holder with bays tucked into the image chamber. The top and bottom needed a few layers of foamcore, but two of the three layers of cardboard on the bottom needed to be removed to make it fit just right, and so the tripod nut extended through the thick outer box. The sides were also close but needed that most klugey of adjustments, several cardboard shims to get the fit exactly right so the film spooled easily.

The film holder is then inserted into the back, which is then covered by the front. The opening in the front and the shutter are big enough for an axial and risen pinhole, but I forgot to cut the shutter in half before it all got glued together. I must confess, after six months in the basement, it all sat on the kitchen table for awhile, and it looks a little beat up. But I want my cameras to look hand made, right? Everything was measured and drawn out with a pencil and ruler as I went along. No laying out anything on the computer.

In addition to being soundless, this post will be colorless. With a nod to the product design, I loaded it with monochromatic Ilford HP5+.

The donors.

My old wired headphones and the iPod mini I had been using because it was a lot lighter than the phone in my shorts pocket in the summer.

Did the ease of use of the AirPods contribute to my guitar renaissance? Intentionally using the extreme depth of field of pinhole here.

My only customization to the Telecaster - a Seymour Duncan Hot Rail humbucker at the bridge.

It's a lot more pleasant practicing in the Sunroom than in the basement.

To keep the impact on the room and the sanity of the neighborhood as minimal as possible, another type of Pod, from the '90's.

I haven't unleashed the Marshall yet, but the fan runs and pilot lights come on.

Sarah's portable Marshall bluetooth speaker.

Sarah's electric piano.

The acoustic section.

Sarah's grandfather's trombone, missing a few crucial, expensive pieces.

I found a bunch of cassettes and CDs still in their cases, which I've been listening to in the '99 Mustang. Too bad the label on the cassette is so overexposed. The list of songs is done with a manual typewriter and the album title "Fathers and Sons" is done with presstype.

The AirPod Pro Box Camera has a .28mm pinhole 40mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Ilford HP5+ was semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.  

I made a camera in 2017 out of an iPhone Box and named it the 10th Anniversary iPhone Box Camera. That blog post has gotten the most hits of all of Pinholica, except for the plans to make a Populist. Let's see what the search engines do with this.