I'm the kind of old man for whom it's hard to buy presents, so I often get bottles of single malt Scotch for gifts. Unlike other craft whiskeys, Scotch always comes in these really sturdy, nicely designed boxes. I've made several cameras from them including my first 6x6cm camera, the Glenlivet Vertical Populist and one for Joe Van Cleave last summer.
Working on refining the templates for the Compact series of cameras with the new folded film bay scheme, gave me a chance to use the four Glenlivet boxes that have been living in the basement for a few years.
They became a Compact 45 and a 60mm Evil Cube. The front of the 45 features the turquoise logo from the back of the box, and on the 60mm the main, beige label. On the camera backs are the opposite scheme. I also saved the corks. It looks like they changed the design on those at some point. Nice that I had two of each.
As always, the first run through a new design identified numerous mistakes in the template, but nothing I couldn't adjust on the fly. The ease and reliability of the film transport, which is the whole point of the redesign, was very good.
They both have hand drilled pinholes - .27mm on the 45 and .30mm on the Evil Cube.
I set out to test the 45mm on a very foggy day.
The 1911 monument to George Washington was originally located near the lagoon in Menomonee Park. Critics felt it wasn't prominent enough and in 1957 it was moved to the north end of the park near the newly posh Memonomee Drive. It's a bronze copy of a marble sculpture at the Virginia Statehouse, said to be "the most perfect delineation of the first President of the United States that was ever made." It's one of several monuments given to the city by Colonel John Hicks, the owner of The Oshkosh Northwestern.
The Chief Oshkosh monument, another of Colonel Hicks' contributions to the city, was about as imperfect a delineation of the person it was suppose to depict as you can get. It looks nothing like his face or figure and includes a barely disguised racial slur. Some additional signage to illuminate the real historical figure has been approved but that was three years ago and nothing yet.
The temperatures have gotten to more temperate levels. The polar vortex of late December only made the ice on Lake Winnebago traversable by foot or small vehicles. There were several people fishing out on the ice in Miller's Bay, some in tents and some sitting on a bucket next to the hole they drilled in the ice
Taking pictures of people's homes, although perfectly legal from a public space, tends to make them a little nervous. Recently I realized that if I set up the camera and then looked the other way during the exposure, they wouldn't realize the camera was actually pointed at them. Two of the grand Victorians on Washington Avenue.
The Canadian National Railroad bridge fades into the fog.
It's surprising how easy it is to make Senator Johnson's local office look creepy.
When I finished the 60mm, I went over to campus for a little architectural fun on a Saturday morning between semesters.
The Preibe Gallery juts out from the side of the Fine Arts Building.
Once again my square format camera insisted on this subject. I wonder if the sculptor intended this thing to be leaning a degree or two to the left.
Before they moved to Lincoln School, this was the exit to the playground of the Children's Center in the basement of Swart Hall. Back then it was surrounded by a fence and you couldn't get this close to it.
I used to give presentations in Buckstaff Planetarium. They had a great stereo system. I started with "Ten Thousand Light Years from Home" while the audience was being seated and closed with Jiminy Cricket's "When You Wish Upon a Star." It was fun to operate the Spitz projector with about twenty-five dials. It had a bazillion gears and it was fiendish to maintain. I once helped a physics professor calibrate it so the planets were in the right place in the sky. The Student Technology Fee once approved a new digital projector, but that's apparently fallen through because they've pried the name off over the door. Now it looks like some alien script and the sign next to it says Buckstaff Hall.
The passage between Harrington Hall and Halsey Science Center.
This pit was built in the 60s to accomodate the emergency generator to keep the data center, behind the basement windows on the left, going through occasional power outages.
The west door to Dempsey Hall.
Oviatt House, formerly the President's house and then the Foundation, it now houses the University Scholars Program. The tower and the tree were on the University logo, but it was too detailed to stitch on a baseball cap, so they changed it.
Don't you wish I'd just point the camera up at something occasionally?
For three decades I labored served in Polk Library. Both the Chancellor and the Director of the Library have told me it will likely be razed and replaced in the next three years. They both said it was because "the building is shot." This door has not been used since the secure entrances were limited to just one after the 1988 renovations. I wonder about the fate of that mosaic, original to the 1963 building.
Polk was built in two parts. This is the front of the first building. After the remodeling, those expansive windows along the colonnade were the librarian's offices. My office was in the interior suite in the basement of the 1972 South addition.
The Glenlivet 45 has .25mm pinholes, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Glenlivet 60 has .30 pinholes 60mm from a 6x6cm frame. Both have pinholes on the axis, and 15mm above the axis. The film is Ilford FP4+ semistand developed in Caffenol.
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