Supporting local business

 

To everybody else, Kimberly-Clark is a huge international conglomerate, but in the Fox Valley, they're a local business. Like other large companies they occasionally provide support to area non-profits like Photo Opp, so maybe a camera made out of their packaging might contribute somehow. On their web site they promote a hashtag #KleenexCrafts for projects made from their packaging.

They put a lot of effort in making attractive boxes for Kleenex that are ubiquitous in homes and offices. I liked this one featuring a toucan with a penetrating gaze but had to wait a while until it was empty to make a camera out of it. Which is kind of ironic because my nose is currently trying to expel some kind of virus and I've gone through almost a box while working on this blog post. Despite having a few shrink wrapped multi-packs in the closet, there was just one with this design. A little judicious splicing made a big enough piece for the camera front and back and allowed me to retain the toucans for the shutters and the top viewfinder.

One innovation is sealing it with Mod Podge after years of being disappointed with clear spray acrylics and their smell. I wish I would have tried it before. It seals the cut edges of the cardboard, which have a tendency to delaminate with use, makes it a little waterproof and provides some additional stiffness.

I had .26mm and .28mm pinholes that were rejects from trying to make smaller pinholes. Optimal at 45mm is .27mm. Close enough.

In an ongoing tradition, I took it to Massachussets recently but didn't make any exposures. Did you notice it in the last blog post?

I've made cameras out of Kleenex boxes before. An error on the template required some on-the-fly adjustments to the Diversity 30 that gave it a little bit of a rough look and one ill fitting side. I only had one box for that one as well. Last year when sending a couple medium format cameras overseas, I thought those folks might have fun with a little camera they could just throw in their purse. Plenty of cardboard for a 35mm Populist in even the smaller cube boxes of Kleenex. I don't think either of these have seen film since.

One thing I really liked about the pictures from the Appleton Photo Walk were reflections in the glass walls of buildings. Looking at the Viking and the refrigerator while I was cooking, it seemed they might provide some of the same sort of play with light. The exposure occurred while we ate dinner.

Photo Opp held an open house of their repurposed church. There were some interesting compositions I had noticed before and there's usually plenty of time for very long exposures while chatting about film photography with the hosts and other visitors. One of them was a UW Oshkosh colleague who had participated in my pinhole workshop shortly after she started there in 1996.

n.b. I'm having another Pinhole Day event with Photo Opp again next year on April 28.

The scenes I had remembered required a bit wider angle than this camera provided so I had it backed up right against a corner where I couldn't get behind it for all three of the next pictures. I never get the pointing right when I try this. It makes for some tightly cropped, asymetrical but kind of dynamic compositions.

The other stairwell.

When they first acquired the building, the nave had a dropped ceiling which they've opened up for what will be a dramatic studio space.

Those three previous exposures were about twenty minutes, but outside I could squeeze in an exposure before going home. The Fox Valley Photography Group's theme this month was patterns. This might have been my contribution, but my head started leaking the morning of the meeting and I forgot about it.

The last cherry tomatoes that had been ripening in a paper bag and a few habeneros were sitting on the kitchen counter looking like an interesting color photograph. By the way, these next three are almost 1:1 macro closeups.

There wasn't any more produce coming from the garden but there was still a little action out there. This pansy blossomed long after the tomatoes were gone.

Right next to it was an unopened bud that I didn't think had much of a chance but after several nights in the low 20's F, but several days in the 60's, it opened in mid-November!

We had planted a few red cabbages.There was a near-drought this summer and they never formed heads but did make the garden decorative and fed the butterflies' children. This would have been another possibility for the patterns theme but I had submitted a cabbage for Wabi-sabi last month.

I'm not sure if this is a different variety or just different development but this one had a more pastel color scheme than the other.

My periodic public service announcement about the defensive capabilities of the climbing roses on the arbor.

The almost completed front portico project. The first time the electricians came they only had one part to attach the new lamps to clapboards. One old and one new lamp made the house a little more interesting for Halloween. Since it now looks so fashionable, Sarah painted the door black and accessorized with a white wreath and mums. I almost feel like I live on a posh London street. I lowered the camera and used the rising front to minimize the bare pressure-treated floor of the porch which we can't paint until next spring.

The Toucan 45 has .26mm and .28mm pinholes, on the axis and 13mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is I'm-getting-fed-up-with-how-curly-it-is Kodak Gold 200, the ninth roll processed in the C-41 kit from Arista.edu, which exceeds the officially rated capacity.

A tripodology postscript.

One of the ideas about making better pinhole photographs is to learn to previsualize the image and then put the camera where it needs to be to get that picture. Not always that easy. Here are a few examples.

A two Populist accessory support.

Local resource utilization.