History Pinhole Photography at the Castle

In late October, I loaded the Variable Cuboid with a roll of Lomo 800 for what I expected to be another event that might happen soon at Photo Opp. However, it has sat on the kitchen table until now. 

The Photo Opp organizers struggled to find an indoor space for a winter photo walk that wouldn't be overwhelmed by a crowd of camera-toting visitors. Fortunately, the History Museum at the Castle in downtown Appleton was willing to let us roam the building early on a Sunday afternoon. We gathered in the sunny Siekman Room.

The rear stairwell.

The bottom of that stairwell.

Looking back from the galleries into the lobby and Siekman Room. Those walls have nothing to do with the original building. They were done to make it look a little more medieval when it was rebranded with its current name.

There was a sculptural wooden stationary bike in the Environment and Innovations section, as well as a hand-cranked version next to it. When I started the exposure, two little boys took turns pedaling the bike, but they left, and I took over for the rest of the exposure. The faster you pedaled, it appeared that you were going faster on the monitor, but it must have been some kind of loop because you never got any closer to the canyon wall in the background. Funny that the left monitor seems much dimmer than the other one, but it's solely because it was hidden behind my black shirt during most of the exposure.

Another scene the little boys abandoned shortly after the shutter opened in which I again had to fill in. There was a cylindrical screen with an astronomical survey photograph full of stars, galaxies and nebula. It was moving, but there was a projection of the full moon that I thought would stay still. The whole scene was replaced by a more close-up scene of a swirly nebula. My three-footed figure seems appropriate to the scene.

A wire weaving machine is one of the local innovations in the exhibit.

The massive flywheel in the rear that kept the whole thing moving smoothly.

With my master's degree in Audio-Visual Communication, I couldn't pass up this lantern slide projector, matched with some kind of virtual reality headset. The lantern was soon replaced by an electric lamp, and the three-inch square "lantern" slide format persisted in medical education into the middle of the 20th century. There was a lantern slide projector in the pile of equipment I inherited when I started the AV department at Knox College in 1977.

The gift shop.

The front stairwell.

I was left with a single frame in the camera. On my way out, the friendly staff member was at the front desk who had been chatting with us and pointing out architectural details all afternoon. We had another pleasant chat while the exposure occurred. Trying to describe what this sort of long exposure portrait would look like, I said she'd be recognizable to people who knew her, but otherwise, she'd be an anonymous blur. 

The 35mm front of the Variable Cuboid has a .25mm hand-drilled pinhole on an adjustable rising front with 15mm of travel above the axis. The Lomo 800 was developed in a Cinestill quart powder C41 kit.