The short and long of it with the Variable Cuboid

Another roll of the XPired XP2, this time in the Variable Cuboid, which I hadn't used for a while. Starting out with the 35mm front, I set out for Menomonee Park. 

I think I've photographed this couple before, but they were both in the same hammock. With the wide-angle camera, I was pretty close and asked for permission to photograph them. 

"Go for it."

One of the cabbages looks like it might provide something for us to eat in addition to feeding the caterpillars.

 

Doesn't "A Sunbeam on My Telecaster" sound like a great surf song title?

 

Several years ago, I started photographing the bridge tenders' houses on the drawbridges over the Fox River.  After all the bridges in Oshkosh, and a few I just happened on during Photowalks, I made an effort to get all of them. The last one to finish the set was the Mason Street Bridge in Green Bay, on a four-lane, limited-access road. The day I did the other Green Bay bridges, it was cold and raining. It would require walking about a kilometer to get near it with a wide-angle, or by using a narrow-angle of view from under the bridge, which would require a half-hour exposure. I decided to come back some other time for Mason Street. I was going up there to drop off some photographs for a gallery show recently on a brighter day, so I put the 200mm front on and did it from the shore.

There was originally a smaller-than-the-equations-specify, .50mm, hand-drilled pinhole on the 200mm. When some perfectly sized, .60mm Gilder electron apertures turned up from a long-ago purchase, I changed it. Much to my surprise, I found that I liked the old pinhole much better, which I misplaced as soon as it came out. I drilled a new half-millimeter hole. Might as well spend the rest of the roll to check it out. A sunbeam fell in the living room, with the camera all the way across the room.

The only mature oak in the line of trees along the shore of Millers Bay.

Filling the frame with a large shiny hopper on top of a factory.

Shiny titles in the darkest corner of the living room at f333 for an hour,

These definitely seem better than the larger Gilder aperture, but I'm not sure if they're as good as the original. I still have more XPired XP2 to experiment with. It might be interesting to try a smaller pinhole to see if a tinier spot of light wins over optimal diffraction, even at the expense of a higher f ratio. It's the Variable Cuboid, so it's not really any trouble to switch pinholes mid-roll.

The Variable Cuboid uses a 6x6cm frame. The 35mm front has a .23mm hand-drilled pinhole on a continuously adjustable rising front with 14mm of travel above the axis. The 200mm front has a hand-drilled .50mm pinhole. The XP2 was semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

This is getting personal

After digging a trench, burying the water pipes, and refilling it the entire length of the block on our side of the street, they began laying the new sewer pipes on the other side of the street.

After that, they began installing innocent-sounding laterals, the pipes that run to the private plumbing systems of each house. That requires removing a good bit of your front yard.

All summer, they have been painting things on the sidewalks and putting flags on the lawn to indicate where to dig and where not to. Wye is simply a spelling out of the letter Y, indicating a pipe that branches off a main line.

The before picture. We were hoping these indicated the limits of the trench.

We were wrong; the whole front sidewalk, which we finally had leveled two years ago, came out.

A trench box in our yard. They were nonchalant about me being out there with a pinhole camera and agreed this was the best angle.

They knew where the main internet fiber line was, but not how it branched to individual houses. Fiber optics don't do well when confronted with a backhoe. They came and fixed it right away. Now, our path to the internet lies on the surface with the junction box about a foot from the torn-up street. 

An unusual three-box tower.




The current state of Central Street. Half meter diameter pipes started showing up in everyone's yard. Hard to believe they still have room.

Wyes of some sort?

Also scattered about are giant concrete castings with holes conspicuously the same size as those big pipes.

It's been pretty noisy this week.

The Crackon has two hand-drilled .27mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is my last roll of vintage Fuji NS160. I finally broke down and mixed a new C41 kit.

Escapism

For the last three weeks, we have had four 350-horsepower diesels idling outside the house, which you can feel, with periods of tremendous crashes and clashes of metal-on-metal-on-earth every ten minutes or so.

I made a few escapes with a roll of XPired XP2 in the Little Mutant. There was a regatta of Class A, C and E scows on Lake Winnebago. I arrived as they were launching them, the second time this has happened to me. All five crew members and a few support folks were crawling all over the deck when I started to extend the tripod, but only these two and some spectacular flare were left when the shutter opened.

On the port side of this photograph, launching that boat with the crew on board. One of them introduced herself as a photographer and inquired about the Little Mutant. She'd never done any kind of analogue photography. I gave her my card. Hi!

How I spent my summer vacation. The New York Times review of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt begins with an anecdote about what a commitment a 750-page novel is. I intended to illustrate the wear a paperback of that magnitude experiences after two reads, unaware of how skillfully that trompe l'oeil tear on the book's cover mimics the actual damage.

August 19th is World Photography Day, on which day in 1838, Daguerre first announced his success. He didn't tell anybody how to do it until the next winter, when the French Government paid him for it, faking Talbot into revealing his process first. To properly participate, I took the camera as I went to Oaks Chocolate.

As I was crossing the Jefferson Street Bridge, I saw a pedestrian limping toward me. I stopped at the cutout in front of the bridge house, but was waved forward with the comment that he was only going into the bridge house, which I was in front of. As I started to go, he said, "Where are you going?" I stopped again and told him Oaks Chocolate. 

"Bring me back a box!"

I told him I was a photographer and had done a project about bridge tenders' houses, and I'd get him the chocolate if he'd let me inside and take photographs. Those chocolates were really good but he couldn't do that. I started again,

"Have you heard the bridge is closing for a day next week?"

Again, we had a conversation about the former closure and repair of this bridge three years ago, and the upcoming long-term closure of the Main Street bridge. At some point, it was clear he just wanted to continue talking to someone, and I asked Jim if I could do his portrait.

I placed the camera in the out-of-the-way corner while I got the chocolate. The figure at the counter is a combination of me and the lady following me. They're her white socks.

A compelling sky with Ames Point, Monkey Island and some unusually clustered geese.

Jazzfest was occurring downtown. The 400 block of Main was closed with a stage at the bottom.

The group from the just-finished tribute to local notable John Harmon posing for photographers, including me.

From behind the stage, John Harmon himself at the piano.

The Democratic Party taking advantage of their location on the closed block, selling cheap hot dogs and brats. With jazz's history of diversity, acceptance of new ideas, and cooperation, the other party farther down the street is either entirely ignorant of jazz or, by policy, repelled by it. Their loss.

The Raulf Hotel gave me another excuse for the interesting skies.

The Little Mutant has .27mm pinholes, one on the axis, and one 10mm above the axis, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame.  The XP2 was semi-stand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

Cracking on - on Central Street.

After littering the block with Brobdingnagian equipment and supplies, they began to crack on with the new pipes under Central Street, digging a giant hole at the end of the block. The obvious choice for a camera was the Crackon, loaded with ancient Fuji NS160. Any color shift of the old film might reflect the surreal nature of the experience.

On Tuesday morning, we awoke to a giant dump truck in front of our house. I yielded to temptation and went out while the action was going on, since it was right there, it seemed to be empty, and I thought they usually don't leave these things overnight. (They left one across the street for the next weekend, though.)

The side view of the black truck down the block. It might have a license to kill and is marked with the sign of the beast. It wasn't empty. The driver and I had a nice conversation about photography and the terminology for some of the devices lying about, so I could look them up.

I didn't want to be a distraction, but thought an action shot would be OK when they were right in front of our house. Probably not too unusual for the old retired dudes on the block to be out watching them. It has to be mentioned that this was precisely the day Andy and Kristin arrived for a visit. They cleared our driveway just as they got to the corner.

When they leave for the night, they surround the hole with the machines and wrap them in orange mesh.

Someone left this tool lying on the track of one of the big excavators.

The loader was left halfway up a pile of gravel.

Stuff just left on the street by the contractor's trailer.

All these pipes are color coded. Green is supposed to be sewer and drain lines.

A trench box prepared for the pipe with a bed of gravel. Is that little pipe what they're replacing? Looks too small for a sewer even in 1929.

We were hoping this was the Tardis when it appeared under the magnolia.




The excavator operators' dexterity and lack of concern for bangs and crashes is impressive. All these giant trench boxes and pipes are moved in and out of the trenches with the bucket off, utilizing this great hook.

A hole protected for the night by a bucket resting on a trench box and the giant gravel bucket, which they just push and drag around to position it.

The Crackon has two hand-drilled .27mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. Still pushing my luck with a four-and-a-half-month-old Cinestill Liter Powder C41 kit.

The Crackon is reloaded with the last roll of the old Fuji and is documenting increasingly rare, interesting details in what is becoming a long, noisy, repetitive saga. They still have to pave the street when they're done.

The Eve of Destruction

"On November 12, 2024, the City of Oshkosh Common Council adopted a budget for the 2025 Capital Improvement Program, which included the reconstruction of the streets listed above."

So begins every communication with the city about the project going on in front of us, with the complete text of the resolution attached. Central Street was shaded by a leafy arch of maples, hickory and oak. On Saint Patrick's Day, signs appeared that the street was closed, and they cut down all the trees next to the street. Only our magnolia and the youthful crabapple next door were spared.

The project has been ongoing for months in the three blocks south of ours where Central Street jogs over a bit. Last Friday, they ominously started moving a plethora of massive equipment and supplies onto the boulevard of our block.

 

The first was this giant container, which also held several buckets for the backhoes.

Trench boxes, which are placed in the holes they dig to protect from collapses while people are working in them, come in a variety of sizes.

One twice as wide as the others.

One is twice the length.

Six trench shores, which are 5 by 10-foot, two-inch-thick sheets of steel, moved together in a single pile.

Looks like whatever is under that manhole cover is getting replaced. That's going to take a pretty big hole.

A stack of green pipes.

New hydrants and their connections in front of a pile of black pipes.

Existing manhole covers and grates have already been removed and presumably will be reused.

Lots of machines started showing up. A small loader with a big bucket.

A big digger. The sheer brutality of these things is impressive. They label the inventory numbers on with a welder.

A big loader currently configured as a forklift to move all this stuff around.

An attachment to pound the gravel down after they refilled a hole. It shook the whole house when they were right in front of us.

My favorite of the lot. A plant taking advantage of the dirt accumulating under the arm of one of these beasts. After a week of heavy use, the plant's still there.

Less inviting space underneath the machine.

One of the attachments is a wire brush, which looks like it's used on wet cement.

Surprisingly complex hydraulics needed for it.

So far we've been spared the above-ground hose as the source of all our water that the blocks south of us have had all summer.

The responsible party.

The film is a 220 format roll of very expired Portra 400 NC. Since that format has no backing paper with numbers, I've been writing down how many frames I've used so I don't waste effort taking pictures on the ending leader. When I got to 21, I had plans for the remaining three frames, which I thought I could remember and stopped writing them down. I immediately double-exposed the next frame.

My scheme of advancing one and a quarter rotations of the take-up spool for the first third of the roll, and reducing that to one rotation by the end, worked out pretty well. I got twenty-three frames, but this one was pretty tightly cropped on one side by the end of the roll.

I used the first frame to complete the story of a line of tomato blossoms I've been following because they had to be harvested, so we got to eat them instead of the residents of the garden.

Morton has two hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. My curiosity got the better of me, and this is the fourteenth roll developed in a four-month-old Cinestill Liter Powder C41 kit.