Oh, you mean the short of it with the Variable Cuboid

I didn't mean to be deceptive in my last post by describing 35mm as the short of the Variable Cuboid. Among commercial sellers of 6x6cm pinhole cameras, that is considered far from the pinhole, and there is an even shorter option for the Variable Cuboid - 20mm. At 113 degrees, 30 degrees wider than the 35mm. It's just a hair wider than all those cameras available for purchase. Let's see what that looks like.

Three of my pieces from the No Kings event were in a group show, Main Street, at The Art Garage in Green Bay. I went to the opening. Still cool to see one of my cameras on a sculpture stand.

Hors d'oeuvres and one of those "You'll be a blur but your friends will recognize you" conversations.

Even in the bright front gallery, exposures were long enough to make it a challenge to capture the sparse crowd. The Director and I are the mists on the lower right, having a conversation about seeing how time is recorded in long exposures is one of the attractions of pinhole.

I have to give Dave Heim credit for pointing out this sunbeam in the back.

We didn't use anything from the compost barrel this year, but nonetheless got this extremely vigorous volunteer vine growing halfway across the lot. When I was looking at this, I thought the shadow of the tripod was almost completely blended with the vines, but it almost looks in the way in the picture.

Is it a ghost pumpkin? This one's about the size of an apple, but there's a few weeks of season left.

The new hospital by the river is nearing completion, including an accessible switchback leading down to the riverwalk. In case you were wondering, the exterior is all grey.

The Multicultural Education Center, one of three grand old houses on campus, has been renovated and renamed after an extremely accomplished alum who credits it with part of his success. It still houses multicultural student organizations, but there's no longer a big sign on busy Algoma Boulevard that people who fear loss of privilege get worked up about.

Backing the '99 Mustang out of the left-hand bay of our garage requires a precise turn to avoid the plantings at the corner of the porch. I thought the front was clear and was concentrating on the back. When I felt a bump, I thought something was under the car. Probably weakened by years of close calls, I had torn off the front bumper cover against the door frame. After some disassembly, I discovered the cover was fine, but a few things underneath that it attaches to had to be replaced. Of course, there were several videos on YouTube. The parts were easy to find and pretty cheap.

Nothing more complicated than a socket wrench and a screwdriver was required. Looks just like a 25-year-old car again.

Photo Opp put out a general call for labor one day. Based on my experience in libraries, I was tasked with rearranging the bookcases, which had been emptied for some construction on the wall. If I lived nearby, I would spend a lot of time looking through these. It's a really terrific collection.

In a related Mustang incident, I found a pair of clip-on sunglasses under the seat that I lost at least fifteen years ago. Along with my new little Orange 20RT amp, it's given me ideas about a YouTube character.

Confiteor

There are two confessions I must make. 

This was supposed to be a demonstration of the super-ultra-wide-angle view of the 20mm distance from a 6x6cm frame. Most of them are cropped.

113 degrees is really wide-angle and it's hard to be sure you're previsualizing what's actually in the frame. Often, I would concentrate on one side of the frame, usually the bottom, and let the other side fall where it may, which turned out to make an off-balance composition. Even the most tightly cropped is still wider than the 35mm front. Can you tell which ones are cropped?

The other issue is that every frame included three areas where something blocked the pinhole. (n.b. A light leak would be darker than the rest of the negative.)  The cropping managed a good bit of this, but I have somewhat clumsily retouched these, mostly with the clone tool. Did you notice? I tried to use the Content Aware Fill feature in Photoshop, and it was rubbish. 

By the way, this is a pretty dense negative, but I also darkened this image to enhance the flaws.

Although the pinhole looks like it is well clear of the tape, the shallow depth of field of the microscope reveals significant topography in the tape after years of existence. The angle of view is wide enough that a few edges and fibers of the tape impinged on the image.

The 20mm front of the Variable Cuboid has a hand-drilled .23mm pinhole. The film was Ilford HP5 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

The short and long of it with the Variable Cuboid

Another roll of the XPired XP2, this time in the Variable Cuboid, which I hadn't used for a while. Starting out with the 35mm front, I set out for Menomonee Park. 

I think I've photographed this couple before, but they were both in the same hammock. With the wide-angle camera, I was pretty close and asked for permission to photograph them. 

"Go for it."

One of the cabbages looks like it might provide something for us to eat in addition to feeding the caterpillars.

 

Doesn't "A Sunbeam on My Telecaster" sound like a great surf song title?

 

Several years ago, I started photographing the bridge tenders' houses on the drawbridges over the Fox River.  After all the bridges in Oshkosh, and a few I just happened on during Photowalks, I made an effort to get all of them. The last one to finish the set was the Mason Street Bridge in Green Bay, on a four-lane, limited-access road. The day I did the other Green Bay bridges, it was cold and raining. It would require walking about a kilometer to get near it with a wide-angle, or by using a narrow-angle of view from under the bridge, which would require a half-hour exposure. I decided to come back some other time for Mason Street. I was going up there to drop off some photographs for a gallery show recently on a brighter day, so I put the 200mm front on and did it from the shore.

There was originally a smaller-than-the-equations-specify, .50mm, hand-drilled pinhole on the 200mm. When some perfectly sized, .60mm Gilder electron apertures turned up from a long-ago purchase, I changed it. Much to my surprise, I found that I liked the old pinhole much better, which I misplaced as soon as it came out. I drilled a new half-millimeter hole. Might as well spend the rest of the roll to check it out. A sunbeam fell in the living room, with the camera all the way across the room.

The only mature oak in the line of trees along the shore of Millers Bay.

Filling the frame with a large shiny hopper on top of a factory.

Shiny titles in the darkest corner of the living room at f333 for an hour,

These definitely seem better than the larger Gilder aperture, but I'm not sure if they're as good as the original. I still have more XPired XP2 to experiment with. It might be interesting to try a smaller pinhole to see if a tinier spot of light wins over optimal diffraction, even at the expense of a higher f ratio. It's the Variable Cuboid, so it's not really any trouble to switch pinholes mid-roll.

The Variable Cuboid uses a 6x6cm frame. The 35mm front has a .23mm hand-drilled pinhole on a continuously adjustable rising front with 14mm of travel above the axis. The 200mm front has a hand-drilled .50mm pinhole. The XP2 was semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

This is getting personal

After digging a trench, burying the water pipes, and refilling it the entire length of the block on our side of the street, they began laying the new sewer pipes on the other side of the street.

After that, they began installing innocent-sounding laterals, the pipes that run to the private plumbing systems of each house. That requires removing a good bit of your front yard.

All summer, they have been painting things on the sidewalks and putting flags on the lawn to indicate where to dig and where not to. Wye is simply a spelling out of the letter Y, indicating a pipe that branches off a main line.

The before picture. We were hoping these indicated the limits of the trench.

We were wrong; the whole front sidewalk, which we finally had leveled two years ago, came out.

A trench box in our yard. They were nonchalant about me being out there with a pinhole camera and agreed this was the best angle.

They knew where the main internet fiber line was, but not how it branched to individual houses. Fiber optics don't do well when confronted with a backhoe. They came and fixed it right away. Now, our path to the internet lies on the surface with the junction box about a foot from the torn-up street. 

An unusual three-box tower.




The current state of Central Street. Half meter diameter pipes started showing up in everyone's yard. Hard to believe they still have room.

Wyes of some sort?

Also scattered about are giant concrete castings with holes conspicuously the same size as those big pipes.

It's been pretty noisy this week.

The Crackon has two hand-drilled .27mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is my last roll of vintage Fuji NS160. I finally broke down and mixed a new C41 kit.

Escapism

For the last three weeks, we have had four 350-horsepower diesels idling outside the house, which you can feel, with periods of tremendous crashes and clashes of metal-on-metal-on-earth every ten minutes or so.

I made a few escapes with a roll of XPired XP2 in the Little Mutant. There was a regatta of Class A, C and E scows on Lake Winnebago. I arrived as they were launching them, the second time this has happened to me. All five crew members and a few support folks were crawling all over the deck when I started to extend the tripod, but only these two and some spectacular flare were left when the shutter opened.

On the port side of this photograph, launching that boat with the crew on board. One of them introduced herself as a photographer and inquired about the Little Mutant. She'd never done any kind of analogue photography. I gave her my card. Hi!

How I spent my summer vacation. The New York Times review of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt begins with an anecdote about what a commitment a 750-page novel is. I intended to illustrate the wear a paperback of that magnitude experiences after two reads, unaware of how skillfully that trompe l'oeil tear on the book's cover mimics the actual damage.

August 19th is World Photography Day, on which day in 1838, Daguerre first announced his success. He didn't tell anybody how to do it until the next winter, when the French Government paid him for it, faking Talbot into revealing his process first. To properly participate, I took the camera as I went to Oaks Chocolate.

As I was crossing the Jefferson Street Bridge, I saw a pedestrian limping toward me. I stopped at the cutout in front of the bridge house, but was waved forward with the comment that he was only going into the bridge house, which I was in front of. As I started to go, he said, "Where are you going?" I stopped again and told him Oaks Chocolate. 

"Bring me back a box!"

I told him I was a photographer and had done a project about bridge tenders' houses, and I'd get him the chocolate if he'd let me inside and take photographs. Those chocolates were really good but he couldn't do that. I started again,

"Have you heard the bridge is closing for a day next week?"

Again, we had a conversation about the former closure and repair of this bridge three years ago, and the upcoming long-term closure of the Main Street bridge. At some point, it was clear he just wanted to continue talking to someone, and I asked Jim if I could do his portrait.

I placed the camera in the out-of-the-way corner while I got the chocolate. The figure at the counter is a combination of me and the lady following me. They're her white socks.

A compelling sky with Ames Point, Monkey Island and some unusually clustered geese.

Jazzfest was occurring downtown. The 400 block of Main was closed with a stage at the bottom.

The group from the just-finished tribute to local notable John Harmon posing for photographers, including me.

From behind the stage, John Harmon himself at the piano.

The Democratic Party taking advantage of their location on the closed block, selling cheap hot dogs and brats. With jazz's history of diversity, acceptance of new ideas, and cooperation, the other party farther down the street is either entirely ignorant of jazz or, by policy, repelled by it. Their loss.

The Raulf Hotel gave me another excuse for the interesting skies.

The Little Mutant has .27mm pinholes, one on the axis, and one 10mm above the axis, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame.  The XP2 was semi-stand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

Cracking on - on Central Street.

After littering the block with Brobdingnagian equipment and supplies, they began to crack on with the new pipes under Central Street, digging a giant hole at the end of the block. The obvious choice for a camera was the Crackon, loaded with ancient Fuji NS160. Any color shift of the old film might reflect the surreal nature of the experience.

On Tuesday morning, we awoke to a giant dump truck in front of our house. I yielded to temptation and went out while the action was going on, since it was right there, it seemed to be empty, and I thought they usually don't leave these things overnight. (They left one across the street for the next weekend, though.)

The side view of the black truck down the block. It might have a license to kill and is marked with the sign of the beast. It wasn't empty. The driver and I had a nice conversation about photography and the terminology for some of the devices lying about, so I could look them up.

I didn't want to be a distraction, but thought an action shot would be OK when they were right in front of our house. Probably not too unusual for the old retired dudes on the block to be out watching them. It has to be mentioned that this was precisely the day Andy and Kristin arrived for a visit. They cleared our driveway just as they got to the corner.

When they leave for the night, they surround the hole with the machines and wrap them in orange mesh.

Someone left this tool lying on the track of one of the big excavators.

The loader was left halfway up a pile of gravel.

Stuff just left on the street by the contractor's trailer.

All these pipes are color coded. Green is supposed to be sewer and drain lines.

A trench box prepared for the pipe with a bed of gravel. Is that little pipe what they're replacing? Looks too small for a sewer even in 1929.

We were hoping this was the Tardis when it appeared under the magnolia.




The excavator operators' dexterity and lack of concern for bangs and crashes is impressive. All these giant trench boxes and pipes are moved in and out of the trenches with the bucket off, utilizing this great hook.

A hole protected for the night by a bucket resting on a trench box and the giant gravel bucket, which they just push and drag around to position it.

The Crackon has two hand-drilled .27mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. Still pushing my luck with a four-and-a-half-month-old Cinestill Liter Powder C41 kit.

The Crackon is reloaded with the last roll of the old Fuji and is documenting increasingly rare, interesting details in what is becoming a long, noisy, repetitive saga. They still have to pave the street when they're done.