Pinholiness–now on YouTube

I often worked with a very enthusiastic, but somewhat technically challenged, business professor to help him with using multimedia materials and several other aspects of his on-line course.  Don's a very sociable person and we often talked about our personal interests.  I had a collection of pinhole cameras on a table in the corner of my office, so that came up quite often.

He was a member of the Southwest Noon Rotary, which had a tradition of including some kind of educational talk at their monthly meeting, and Don was active in recruiting (mostly) faculty to give these presentations.  In 2007, he asked me to give a presentation on Pinhole Photography and it's appeal.

I occasionally have had the feeling when trying to explain why I do things in a particular way, such as my reluctance to crop images and printing pinhole negatives at their actual size (before I was seduced by the demon 35mm), that my justifications often sounded more like a religious argument than anything else, so I named the presentation Pinholiness. Since Don warned me that the meeting would begin with a prayer, I figured that might have some appeal.

I think the thesis that pinhole is not just a middle school science demo, but is a mature method of expression for photographers holds up pretty well almost a decade later.

I used one of the first voice recorders for an iPod to record the audio, and later synced it with the slides into a internet deliverable presentation with Adobe Presenter, a flash-based product.  It's been on my web site since then, but it's kind of an odd format, even for flash, and lately wouldn't play on some browsers, and of course, not on a lot of portable devices.  Also my web site is the only thing left on an old server that sooner (probably) than later the university is going to shut down.  Time to get it on another spot and covert it into a more modern, more accessible, format. Many thanks to Wayne (who you may remember as the guy who gave me the Scotch that led to the Glenmorangie Evil Cube) for his help converting it to this format.

So here it is on YouTube.  The presentation is a little over 25 minutes long and 32 minutes including the Q&A. It's embedded below.