Pinhole Footography

Everybody loves a pun and lately, my lower extremities have been dominating my life. Also, it's a particularly pinholey topic.  One common experience of the beginning pinholer is that often the camera has no tripod mount, but in order to take long exposures, it needs to be well supported and the ground is the most convenient place to do that.  Combine that with the advantage of filling the frame with something and one's feet become an almost inevitable subject.

I've also always had a bit of an issue with my feet.  When major universities were competing to give my basketball star older brother a scholarship, John Erickson, head coach of the Wisconsin Badgers came to our house to recruit him.  At the time I was about 5' 4" and had the same size 13 (46 in Europe) feet I have now.  He called me "Feets." He ran for the Senate in 1970.  It made my first experience casting a ballot that much better to be able to vote against him.  (He lost.)

The call for submissions forum on f295 had a Portraits topic one year.  I had just taken this photograph of the distinctive tan pattern of my sandals which I thought captured my essence pretty well.

One winter we had a series of thawing and refreezing days and I was impressed by the way the ice cracked under my feet as a I walked to Walgreens to get some film developed.

Some times you need some sort of a scale object to demonstrate the size of something as with this assessment of agricultural progress done on June 30th one year.

My son attended a wedding where they gave a spruce seedling to all the guests.  After about a year we finally got around to planting it at Sarah's family farm.

One summer I experienced a very painful episode of gout, the famous medieval affliction, while we were on a getaway weekend in Madison with friends.

Occasionally, ground conditions make it difficult to get a good footograph.

One thing that always irritates me a little as a reviewer for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day is how many photographs are submitted with the camera sitting directly on the ground with the pavement of the town square filling most of the frame, so I took this picture inspired by those folks.  If you're running a workshop for pinhole day this year where your participants will be putting the camera on the ground, you might suggest footography.

All with the Populist.  .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame.