Variable Cuboid fields mid-range offense at Titletown

Emboldened by receiving first award in the Main Street exhibit at the Art Garage in Green Bay, after retrieving the camera and photographs, Team Pinholica, led by the Variable Cuboid, seized the opportunity to take on Titletown. The middle angle 45mm front got the starter's nod. 

Titletown is an office and entertainment development just west of Lambeau Field, the home of the Green Bay Packers, who've won 13 NFL championships, four more than da Bearss. Everything has a sponsor. In the middle is Ariens Hill (lawn care equipment made just southwest of here), a tiny ski slope on the roof of a retail complex.

Stereotypically of Wisconsin, there are two microbreweries. Hinterland, which really makes us sound rustic, was the first advance into their territory. Extra points here for photographing through glass with an effective defense against reflections of the bar behind. Everyone being seated by the hostess passed by the camera leaning on the glass wall. She asked if I needed something, but no yellow flags when I said I was just taking a photograph.

Rising to the occasion, up several flights of stairs for the over-the-top view, this time wide open on a mezzanine with no glass and no football fans.

It's a Hail Mary pass going for that up nort' look with the woodsy mural and iron chandeliers in urban sprawl Ashwaubenon.

After that first qualifying round, time for the big leagues. There really is no "back" to Lambeau Field but Pinholica leads with their typical "Behind..." tactic, combining "Hey, my camera has a square format" composition, an aggressive formation with the rule of thirds, and maybe a fake with a little paradoelia.

Under the bleachers. A little risqué for the straightlaced NFL, but an author/title joke should work in Titletown.

Well, this is an unusual format for a square shooter. With that continuously rising front, it couldn't be correcting for sliding open the axial instead of upper pinhole, so it must be an unforced shutter opening error. A lucky save by that rule of thirds. All the gates are also sponsored. As inconspicuous as its products, the Invisalign gate faces the side of the parking lot bordered by regular residential neighborhoods 100 yards away.

Time out on a shaded stairway to substitute the 60mm front. 

Facing busy Lombardi Avenue and Oneida Street, there's a little more pomp and depth to the presentation, which calls for more perspective compression. Plenty of parking lot to drop back into for the long view. An appropriately monumental staircase leading to a modern temple.

Rolling out that lean-the-camera-against-a-wall play again for the long stretch of the three-story Lombardi trophy, this time to avoid getting blocked by a passing fan.

In a vacant hallway outside the back door of the bar on the luxury box level, a risky standing switch in the changing bag to the 35mm front, to capture the expansive space of the atrium. Oh no, that rookie shutter error again. After exclusive play with side sliding shutters for the last season, we saw some practice with the old style up-riser for a few posts, but they seem not to be able to get it all the way out with the tripod at full reach. Relying again on a lucky balance of the composition and good grab of the light. No harm, no foul.

Bummer for the Pinholicans. Delay of game for jammed film! Panic on the field leads to a broken winder. They're gonna need a proper darkroom for that. Forty-five-mile penalty with no time remaining!

Futzing in the dark regains another frame for a team picture. Mostly to test that a new pinhole for the 20mm front isn't blocked by anything.

Trainer's report

 If the film jams, don't keep trying, you'll break the winder! This is going to take some Dremel and glue therapy.

The film jam occurred because of insufficient care and winding at the beginning of the roll! That crinkled film made it a little wider at the leading bottom edge of the film until new film just had nowhere to go. The film holder should be back in the game with the corners reinforced with a little Liquitex and some extra, careful turns when loading. This wouldn't load onto a Paterson developing reel, but it was easy with a classic stainless steel spiral. Started at the other end, it could have gotten on the Paterson reel, but it was in the dark and I didn't realize the extent of the crinkling yet.

From a problem a couple of posts ago, when looking into the tape blocking problems with the 20mm front, the tape was so near the pinhole because it was a .20mm Gilder Electron Microscope Aperture that's in a tiny, flimsy, 3mm copper disk. I destroyed it trying to improve the mount and installed a new hand-drilled .22mm hole in a piece of brass big enough to stay well away from the pinhole with the tape.

The 35mm front has a .23mm pinhole, the 45mm front a .27mm, and the 60mm front, a .30mm. All are hand-drilled and mounted on a continuously adjustable rising front. The format is 6x6cm. The film was Kentmere 400 semi-stand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

You call that wide angle?

 

My recent experiences with much longer than usual and a little shorter than usual distances from the pinhole got me wondering about going even wider than the 20mm front, which captures a 113-degree view. The Variable Cuboid is made to accommodate as short a front as 10mm. What is it like going into that frontier? I've actually made one exposure in a 16x20-inch camera that's almost that wide. I decided to take a more modest step and make a 15mm front, which would give a 127-degree angle of view. It took me almost all afternoon. It has a 0.18mm pinhole from my cast-offs, mounted in an extra-wide shutter opening so nothing got in the way.

The only camera I know of this extreme is Zernike Au's Zero 4x5 System, which has three sections so you can use it at several angles. The shortest is 25mm, slightly wider than my new front, but only in one dimension because of its rectangular format.

When I started making 6x6cm cameras, they were 60mm from pinhole to film. Moderately wide angle to a lens user at 53 degrees, it's whoppingly narrow angle in the pinhole community. My reason for avoiding the popular wider angles was because of the inevitable vignetting. The closer the pinhole is to the film, the farther the light has to go to get to the corners and spreads out more than it does in the center. With this 15mm front, it's over twice as far, which calculates out to four stops. If you've ever under or overexposed a roll of film by four stops, you know what a big deal this is. You'll just get the highlights, if any, at the edges, and the center is going to be overexposed.

I always expected, and saw a lot of examples, of bright circles of image which faded to black well before the edge of the frame. This is sometimes considered as seeing the entire projected image of the pinhole. I see it as not using the whole piece of film.

As I built wider and wider cameras, I found that this could be managed to a point. Firstly, by using semi-stand developing, which holds back those overexposed centers from getting too dense. Reducing the contrast when scanning makes sure it captures everything that's in the negative. If a little at the top and bottom of the histogram is lost in that process, it can easily be brought back to the full range. With 16-bit grey scale files, there's plenty of data to get a completely smooth JPEG. Then I quite liberally treat the image locally, dodging any detail in the corners, burning in the middle, switching between the tool's ranges, and recorrecting the brightness and contrast as necessary.

There are still the dark corners directing the eye to the center that is so prized by vignettophiles, but there is also a composition of the whole frame.

How much difference will another 14 degrees make? 

All except two of these are the entire negative, and those two are still wider than the 20mm. 

The entire Sunroom, from just above my head. The camera looks pretty high up, but I could reach it without extending my arm. Some photons make it to the edges, but mostly just the highlights.

It's no trouble exposing the edge if it's bright enough. Another thing illustrated here is how exposure and resolution are degraded because, from the edge, the pinhole appears to be a rather flat ellipse, further reducing its area, and flirting with serious diffraction. I've known about this forever, but it's still kind of a shock to see the actual difference diagramed like this. 

In the center, you can read the titles of the books. The handle and middle lock of the guitar case are nicely rendered, but the nearer one is fuzzy, and the corner is practically cloudy.

A scheme for handling vignetting is to find a scene with a dark center and bright edges. Under the archway with the dining room window to the left and the well-lit mantle to the right, this seemed like that arrangement. However, my poor human brain could not get the fact that the whole side of the house was in the frame.

Exposing for the shadowed side of the backlit arrangement on the lanai seemed like it could fill the frame.

To fill the frame with a close-up, you have to get really close. There was barely room to get my finger between the camera and the squash to open the shutter.

From the island in the middle of State Street, The Oshkosh Northwestern looks like a toy temple on a broad plaza.

Converging verticals are going to be prominent if you tilt the camera up. A rising front didn't seem worthwhile with this device.

The shadowed entrance with the better lit front windows seemed like the right kind of target. Another super wide feature is that any little deviation from perfectly parallel to your subject is going to result in exaggerated converging perspective.

I've never noticed these architects' credits on the First National Bank building. This is one of the cropped images, but only to level that window sill. Any deviation from level is also exacerbated by the wide angle, and I can't abide a crooked composition.

The patio at Beckets.' The last bit of fuzzy roofline at the upper left and the one on the right are parallel!

The white lanai barely makes an impression at the edges, but there's just enough detail to define the planes.

That patient and willing model sitting in for the comically wide-angle portrait. Really makes my already comically large spectacles look big. I should have gotten closer for the funhouse look. The camera was at least 10cm from my nose. That tiny sunbeam saves the left side of the frame from the oblivion of my shadow.

The 15mm front for the Variable Cuboid has a .18mm hand-drilled pinhole. The film was Ilford HP5 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

And yet it continues...

All summer, the EyePA 30 and a photograph done with it has been in an exhibit in Wausau, which was awarded an honorable mention. So it didn't get a swelled head, I put it on construction duty as soon as it got home, loaded with humble Lomo 100.

It's been almost a month since my last post about the reconstruction of Central Street, and they're still at it.

Somehow finding room amid the pipes they've already buried, they began with the big corrugated pipes for the storm sewers.

More laterals, this time for sewer. Very surreal to watch one of these things on your front lawn coming toward your house.

The view from upstairs.  The wide angle disguises the scale a bit, but you can gauge it from the worker in the yellow vest.

On the other hand, I haven't mowed the lawn since mid-July.

They removed any remaining sections of sidewalk and used a giant chainsaw to dig a trench to bury smaller pipes where the sidewalk had been.

The inadequate storm sewers. They get these out by whacking the connections repeatedly with the excavator bucket. After they pick them out of the trench, they don't set them down gently; they just drop them from about two meters up.

This compaction roller vibrates the whole house when it goes up and down the street. When it's right in front, the windows rattle.

A few tons of water for something.

The lone and level gravel stretches far away.

Next, paving.

The EyePA has two .23mm hand-drilled pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Lomo 100 was developed in a Cinestill Quart Powder C41 kit.

Oh, you mean the short of it with the Variable Cuboid

I didn't mean to be deceptive in my last post by describing 35mm as the short of the Variable Cuboid. Among commercial sellers of 6x6cm pinhole cameras, that is considered far from the pinhole, and there is an even shorter option for the Variable Cuboid - 20mm. At 113 degrees, 30 degrees wider than the 35mm. It's just a hair wider than all those cameras available for purchase. Let's see what that looks like.

Three of my pieces from the No Kings event were in a group show, Main Street, at The Art Garage in Green Bay. I went to the opening. Still cool to see one of my cameras on a sculpture stand.

Hors d'oeuvres and one of those "You'll be a blur but your friends will recognize you" conversations.

Even in the bright front gallery, exposures were long enough to make it a challenge to capture the sparse crowd. The Director and I are the mists on the lower right, having a conversation about seeing how time is recorded in long exposures is one of the attractions of pinhole.

I have to give Dave Heim credit for pointing out this sunbeam in the back.

We didn't use anything from the compost barrel this year, but nonetheless got this extremely vigorous volunteer vine growing halfway across the lot. When I was looking at this, I thought the shadow of the tripod was almost completely blended with the vines, but it almost looks in the way in the picture.

Is it a ghost pumpkin? This one's about the size of an apple, but there's a few weeks of season left.

The new hospital by the river is nearing completion, including an accessible switchback leading down to the riverwalk. In case you were wondering, the exterior is all grey.

The Multicultural Education Center, one of three grand old houses on campus, has been renovated and renamed after an extremely accomplished alum who credits it with part of his success. It still houses multicultural student organizations, but there's no longer a big sign on busy Algoma Boulevard that people who fear loss of privilege get worked up about.

Backing the '99 Mustang out of the left-hand bay of our garage requires a precise turn to avoid the plantings at the corner of the porch. I thought the front was clear and was concentrating on the back. When I felt a bump, I thought something was under the car. Probably weakened by years of close calls, I had torn off the front bumper cover against the door frame. After some disassembly, I discovered the cover was fine, but a few things underneath that it attaches to had to be replaced. Of course, there were several videos on YouTube. The parts were easy to find and pretty cheap.

Nothing more complicated than a socket wrench and a screwdriver was required. Looks just like a 25-year-old car again.

Photo Opp put out a general call for labor one day. Based on my experience in libraries, I was tasked with rearranging the bookcases, which had been emptied for some construction on the wall. If I lived nearby, I would spend a lot of time looking through these. It's a really terrific collection.

In a related Mustang incident, I found a pair of clip-on sunglasses under the seat that I lost at least fifteen years ago. Along with my new little Orange 20RT amp, it's given me ideas about a YouTube character.

Confiteor

There are two confessions I must make. 

This was supposed to be a demonstration of the super-ultra-wide-angle view of the 20mm distance from a 6x6cm frame. Most of them are cropped.

113 degrees is really wide-angle and it's hard to be sure you're previsualizing what's actually in the frame. Often, I would concentrate on one side of the frame, usually the bottom, and let the other side fall where it may, which turned out to make an off-balance composition. Even the most tightly cropped is still wider than the 35mm front. Can you tell which ones are cropped?

The other issue is that every frame included three areas where something blocked the pinhole. (n.b. A light leak would be darker than the rest of the negative.)  The cropping managed a good bit of this, but I have somewhat clumsily retouched these, mostly with the clone tool. Did you notice? I tried to use the Content Aware Fill feature in Photoshop, and it was rubbish. 

By the way, this is a pretty dense negative, but I also darkened this image to enhance the flaws.

Although the pinhole looks like it is well clear of the tape, the shallow depth of field of the microscope reveals significant topography in the tape after years of existence. The angle of view is wide enough that a few edges and fibers of the tape impinged on the image.

The 20mm front of the Variable Cuboid has a hand-drilled .23mm pinhole. The film was Ilford HP5 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.