Adventures and misadventures with the Variable Cuboid.

For the Oshkosh Public Museum’s “Then and Now” exhibit, I really wanted to make a match for one of the archive pictures of a woman working at the Buckstaff Furniture factory. The site is now occupied by the Menomonie Nations Arena which hosts the Winter Farmers’ Market.

These apple sellers had a colorful display. I hadn’t noticed the distracting poster of the guy with the sword and the pizza behind them, and the round table cloth doesn’t do much for the composition.

I buy cheese from this lady nearly every week. All the boxes, blocks of cheese and tubs of spread make a better match for the belts and pulleys in the archival picture

These two were with the 45mm front for the Variable Cuboid.

When I made the new camera for the Building the Variable Cuboid post, I made a 100mm Front, which I hadn’t used yet. Better try it out.

In order to get any shadow detail when photographing holiday decorations, the lights often get really blown out. I exposed this for the time measured without the lights and turned them on for just the last minute.

I put a continuously adjustable rising front on the 100mm and tried it out on the just-a-bit-higher-than-my-tripod-will-go pothos above the bathtub. This is with the front at maximum rise. One nice thing about the long distance to the pinhole is there’s virtually no vignetting even this far off axis. The verticals did remain parallel.

While I was waiting for that exposure, this blue bottle with the shiny gold lettering on the dresser in the bedroom across the hall caught my eye, and I am a fan of close-ups. This is about a 1.5 to 1 macrophotograph.

I finally got around to going out with the 100mm while shopping for holiday gifts. While in the store where I’ve been buying jewelry for Sarah for years, I thought the room dividers and the counters formed an interesting composition. No one else was in the store so while they wrapped my package, I opened up the tripod and made this exposure.

And then, disaster!

I’ve been using the Variable Cuboid for almost a year now in all sorts of conditions. I’ve only seen one light leak when I rode around for about 50 miles on a couple bright sunny days with the camera on the tripod strapped to the rack on the back of my bicycle. Since that also included one time the camera jostled off the tripod and bounced down the highway, it didn’t seem like a problem. Now that I think about it, since then I’ve been careful to take the camera off the tripod and put it in my back pack while riding around. This time, however, I just carried it mounted on the tripod while I walked around downtown in the sunshine looking for something to photograph. This was also with the Lomo 800 in the camera, so it didn’t take as much stray light to cause mischief.  It appears that the sun can get down the light trap if given an opportunity, at least with this front.

The solution is more cardboard, of course.

On the top of the camera the front slides under the winders which keeps it in pretty good contact. The bottom is held tight by the tripod mount. On the sides where the pictures indicated it was vulnerable, I glued one double layer of cardboard on the film back just where the fronts stop, and then another which the front will slide under and deny Old Sol a chance to sneak down that way. It makes it a little bit fussier to change the fronts, but it’s still doable.

I hope it works.