Small format, wide camera, short roll, long time.

In mid-July, in anticipation of upcoming events, I loaded the venerable PrePopulist with a "24 exposure" roll of film. I chose the camera with its 24x50mm format and the short roll of film so I wouldn't have to take so many pictures before I got to see them.

The first event in question was Photo Opp's Rummage Sale of donated gear. They kept what was needed for their educational mission, but the sale included a lot of usable stuff, roughly categorized on tables and in bins.

A group showing me their discoveries.

The display of lighting equipment. I got an umbrella and stand.

A badly composed image of a table of folders. Non-working cameras were $5 and working ones $15. I also got a pretty neat rangefinder and a professional tripod.

As a higher education audio-visual professional, 16mm film projectors have played a central role in my life. The most common fear of public speaking is obviously not a problem with college faculty, but operating one of these probably took its place for them in the 20th century. I learned to thread one in science class in 7th grade on a Bell & Howell 535 and got punished in art class in 8th grade for running the film in reverse. This one is an auto-loading 556. The lamps are still available for only $11. (Always buy a spare lamp.) Photo Opp has surely kept a projector for 16mm, but I bet it's a manual-loading Kodak Pageant.

Then I set the camera down on the shelf in the basement and knocked it over the back with at least two layers of bags and boxes on the floor in the way. In October, Andy came and helped recover a working space in the basement so I could get at the bottom of the shelves. Preparing for a workshop in Wausau, I organized my collection of raw materials, much of which had also fallen behind the shelf, and recovered the camera to record making Populists on the 1st of November.

After making cameras, we all went to lunch at The Mint, Wausau's oldest restaurant, here since the 19th century.

Sarah and I went to lunch at Fratello's one sunny day.  Looking into the bar while we waited to be seated.

The Appleton Dam just out the window. I found myself thinking how nice it was that we got seated in this warm dining room instead of the one the ducks were feasting in just below us.

The Truffle Pig restaurant that I predicted on this blog has opened, and we have visited several times. It's very nice. Finally, more emphasis on the experience and not just a giant plate of food.

In the midst of all the character-building events of the year, the reviled Jenn-Air refrigerator decided to add refrigeration to the list of things it's no longer capable of. Many thanks to the FedEx delivery driver who carried the dorm refrigerator over the rubble to get us through for a month until someone could manage with the full-size model when the street was done, with no through-the-door anything and no handles to come loose.

I checked out the massive Irving Penn Centennial from the library. His signature style was working against a studio background wherever he went, but just using available north light. When he was among the top commercial photographers in the world, he used to go into the darkroom and hand-coat big sheets of platinum paper for his personal prints. My list of influences is long and constantly changing, but Penn is always on it. This is an uncomfortable segue. Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, who sent me down this pinholic rabbit hole and about the only photographer who influenced me that I have actually met, has just died.

Because of a few shutter opening and clicker errors, and maybe because I was eager to get it done when it seemed a little hard to wind, there was a particularly low yield from this already short roll of film. About time, though.

The PrePopulist has a .15mm Gilder electron microscope aperture 24mm from a 24x50mm frame. The film is Kodak 400 UltraMax developed in Cinestill's C41 Powder Kit.

C'est fin

Several weeks after the end of the destruction-and-burying-things phase of the Central Street project, reconstruction finally began.

This gigantic machine showed up at the end of the block.

They prepare and pave half the road at a time, guided by an orange string. There was a supply of this bent green rebar every 10 meters or so.

The completed east side.

Our magnolia was the subject of some disagreement between the people who run that giant machine and the city, which wanted to save the mature flowering tree, which is on the approved list for planting next to the street. When they were stretching that orange string on our side, someone painted an orange X on the trunk and wrote "In the way" with an arrow pointing to it in the dirt next to it. This led to a discussion in which the city engineer eventually clarified who made these decisions. The giant machine was diverted around the tree. Maybe the neighbors will replant with some of these.

We imagined this as a reflecting pool for the magnolia for a while.

 

A giant excavator left mid-stroke grading the surface

Eventually, they came back and built forms and poured our bit of the street.

Drilling a hole with a high-pressure water hose to get at something they buried earlier this summer.

All ready for sidewalks and driveways.

Pouring our driveway and the sidewalk. A surprisingly manual process compared to the machine-sculpted street and curb, involving shovels, rakes, long boards dragged across it to level the surface, and the curved edge of the apron sculpted by hand with a trowel.

During all this, the Mustangs were exiled to the street a half block away. The first few days, everybody adhered to the alternate side parking rule, but soon we all just had our parking spots. Could be worse than having two Mustangs in front of your house.

The finished product - almost. A private contractor needs to come and redo the pipes from the city lines to our house, probably in the spring. That goes under the sidewalk and the porch, so we get a neat Goth path in asphalt, which is cheaper to install and remove than concrete. The magnolia finally has what's left of its roots reburied. It's obviously been stressed, including one of its branches being torn off by an excavator. There's been a frost, the remaining leaves are gone, but it's full of flower buds. Many thanks to Glody Onya, the Project Manager, and Travis Derks, Landscape Operations Manager, for preserving our tree. 

Morton has two .23mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film was Kodak Gold developed in Cinestill's Powder C41 kit.

Workshop in Wausau

 

Last Saturday at the Center for Visual Arts in Wausau, I introduced Mara, Kristin and Jean, three enthusiastic, cheerful artists, to the practice of pinhole as well as to photography as a medium in general. All were practicing artists in other media, but didn't consider themselves photographers or had any prior photography instruction. 

Everyone made an attractive camera with particularly smooth shutters and film advance, and all drilled a nice round pinhole within a few hundredths of a millimeter from the optimal on the first or second try. 

They already grasped the idea of previsualizing a picture and understood my instruction to put the camera where they needed to frame that composition, using the viewfinder beads to determine the edges of the frame. It's probably not much different than deciding where to put an easel to sketch a scene. The 90-degree wide-angle didn't seem to be a problem. I saw several frame-filling close-ups that had to be very close to the camera. They all got 12 accurate exposures by referring to a table of lighting conditions. To be fair, it was uniformly cloudy, so the exposure was four seconds almost everywhere.

None of them had any experience with analogue photography, other than dropping off film from a point-and-shoot to get processed. Unrolling the film off the developing reels was a very dramatic experience with oohs and aahs.

They did an extraordinarily good job. Most of their images I wouldn't be surprised to see on a gallery wall, and that's before editing. Jean made a blog post with a few of her photographs.

The museum sits on one corner of City Square, a few blocks above the Wisconsin River. Mara and Kristin went off down the valley (very cool skies over the river), and Jean and I stayed around the square.

My camera is the Original Premi in the lower right corner above. I used to avoid white and lighter colored packaging because its opacity can be suspect, but now with the triple-layer shutters covering the entire front and back, it hardly matters.

Next door to the Museum is the Grand Theater. The last gasp of Neo-Classicism, with the square columns mere decorations on the exterior, the bases oddly unmatched.

The south side of the square is dominated by a large bandshell supported by these very functional columns.

Looks like plenty of electricity for the band to plug their amps into.

There was an emergency call to a person who had fainted on a park bench. I took the opportunity to photograph the shiny fire truck that came along with them. 

The Palladian is a condo building with very little, if any, Palladian architectural elements.

Third Street is lined with clusters of trees that were in autumnal yellows in front of the brick. There seemed to be an SUV almost everywhere I wanted to put my tripod to feature one, but maybe a little off-center is better composition.

Symmetrical decorative ironwork to protect both tree and pedestrian.

An asymmetrical Deco entrance.

When we got back near the museum, there were no cars parked in front of the theater. The marquee of the Grand changes after just about the length of the exposure.

The back stairwell to go with the photo of the front one I did this summer.

All three participants made one deliberate double exposure. Mine was not deliberate, but makes a great segue. One of our living room chairs in front of the building out the museum window, with tiny concrete patio furniture on the floor next to it; the background faded by the already exposed sky.

The spooky state of the mantle, from 9:14 until 9:15.

The most serious problem that occurred is that I wasted fifteen minutes when I forgot to turn on the LED light pad when we were capturing the positives. The iPad tried really hard, but I couldn't figure out why it had trouble focusing (lenses!), and the files were so low contrast and noisy.

One thing that keeps occurring to me while doing this: If you have been thinking you'd like a pinhole camera that's reliable, lightweight, rugged and easy to use, build one of these. It's easy. They're a joy to use.

The Original Premi has a .23mm pinhole 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Kentmere 400 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

Instructor certification

 

In order to offer a Pinholica-branded workshop, such as the one at the Center for Visual Arts in Wausau this Saturday, the instructor must be certified both as a cardboard craftsperson as well as a competent pinholer.

This box turned up in a closet rearrangement, with silver and white type on a black field, exactly the size of the front of a 120 Populist. Back then, iPods were packaged in a huge foam block in a box, with a sleeve over that, so there was plenty of material. This will also be the first workshop with the new scheme of the shutters covering the entire front and back of the camera, so the template needed to be certified as well.

Besides the ease of taking advantage of the package illustration, the thick shutters provide a firm base to insert map tacks as viewfinders without worrying about pinpoints inside your camera.

First assessment completed. Now, to qualify both camera and instructor in the field.

I didn't even know there were buoys in Millers Bay until this one appeared on the shore. 

A common compositional recommendation to beginners is to take a picture of something, not just because a scene looked pretty, but here I am just struck by the light. For the past few years, I've been playing with using overexposed backgrounds to create depth.  A "conversation with light" maybe? Is abstract composition enough?

A more classical arrangement with a definite center of interest, which I just noticed one afternoon. At the Fox Valley Photography Group, this month's theme is Still Life. In the discussion, I pointed out that windows and sunbeams in your house make great light sources and that I'm surprised I don't see more pictures of domestic scenes because they seem to happen in front of me all the time. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Doesn't the sun shine into your windows? By the way, in French, Still Life is Nature Morte, but I didn't bring that up.

We've been continuing to have meals on the lanai, despite autumnal conditions. It's our response to a vlogger's soliloquy on how, after living for years in an unheated medieval building, she began to appreciate how her adaptations became pleasures. Overcoming hardships was making her a better person. Our record is 49°F.

There have been a few meals in the dining room.

The mysterious vine that appeared among the tomatoes turned out to be white acorn squash. It yielded three edible-sized gourds, but I haven't tried to cut one in half yet. Depicted here almost in situ in the dappled light in the garden.

Another attempt at the assignment, in the soft light on the lanai.

I recently received two checks for pinhole photography work and went down to the bank to deposit them. The person in front of me was getting a large amount of cash counted out, which took forever. I knew they'd be sensitive to a photograph inside the bank, but I wanted to document the involvement of art in the economy, and I was getting impatient, so I set up the camera. When it was finally my turn, I opened the shutter and approached the desk. The clerk informed me that filming was prohibited in the lobby. I replied that it was one two-minute exposure and everyone would be an unrecognizable blur. She went off to another computer and, after several minutes, returned with my receipt and asked that I not take any more photographs since it was a security risk, as the pictures would reveal the coverage of their CCTV cameras. I think I can identify where the cameras are, but I could have written down a more accurate description of the coverage area.

In August, the black Maserati I've photographed several times on State Street was replaced by a white one, but I ruined the exposure.  When I came by another day and saw the sports car parked there again, the black one had returned, but it didn't occur to me that it wasn't the white one I intended to photograph.

The completed William Waters Gazebo. I wonder what kind of programming will occur here. There's a small lawn in front with no seating, probably because of the current cultural expectation of carrying your own camp chair?

Facing a long wait for the printer at the Library while another patron struggled with printing from a restricted database, I set the camera on the wall overlooking the cheerful staircase.

When I returned home, this appeared before me on the dining room table. It seems another blogger has been around here.

The 60GB iPod has a hand-drilled .23mm pinhole 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film was Kentmere 400 developed in Caffenol.

This fellow does seem to be qualified to reveal all of Pinholica's secrets this weekend.