Venerable film still worth it's salt.

I always check the film shelf at Camera Casino to see if there might be any bargains. In a bit of a hurry to pick up a print and get it to the frame shop, I grabbed three rolls of Portra 400 NC for five bucks a roll, not noticing that it was 220 format. As the leader tells you in three separate places, it's intended only for special equipment designed to handle it, for two reasons. It's twice as long as a 120 roll - 24 6x6cm frames and, in order to stuff that extra film around the same reel, it has no backing paper.

My Morton camera is definitely not special. Without backing paper with numbers to tell me where to stop, how will I know where the film starts and then how to wind the film without overlapping images? The first was easy. I loaded the camera in the dark. I could feel where the film started. Practicing with old backing paper I roughly determined how many turns of the winder would get me from one frame to the next - about one and a half. (This is the way most manufactured 35mm pinhole cameras recommend.) It looks like that's safely sufficient at the start, but as expected, as the diameter of the film on that reel increased, I was losing over half a frame each time. I only got 18 pictures.

To compensate for no backing paper to protect exposure from the counter hole, and no need to see numbers, I covered the hole with three layers of black masking tape, which wouldn't damage the camera when peeled off. I knew one layer wasn't completely opaque. The shutter handle was also taped closed so I wouldn't accidentally try to check it.  As evident in three of the negatives above, when exposed to outside daylight, the double-layer shutter with the masking tape wasn't sufficient to block the light through it. That was sort of a surprise. The rest of the camera, which is made of particularly heavy card stock with four layers and a black template everywhere but the shutters, seems light-tight otherwise. 

The 220 roll of film is much longer than 120, but with Paterson developing reels, which are designed to hold six-foot-long 36-exposure 35mm film, it fits with no trouble.

Portra 400 existed in two versions prior to 2011, Natural Color (NC), which these rolls are, and Vibrant Color (VC), so they are at least that old. I didn't ask at Camera Casino, but they were probably refrigerated if not frozen. Spoiler alert: it's old color film and it looks like it. It's at least a stop slow, particularly in dim light, and maybe fogged a little at the edges, but that could be the lack of backing paper again. The color balance isn't that far off, and the contrast mask isn't particularly dark. My favorite part, which just may be the spring humidity, is that the negatives dried perfectly flat.

As the C41 data sheets tell you after a lecture on capacity and shelf life, "if you accept the role as final arbiter of acceptable results," you can exceed the limitations noted. That goes for outdated film as well. Let's see what arbitration I can do with these negatives. (n.b. my C41 kit is well within the recommended limits.)

We had an eventful week and I didn't get to it for a while after I loaded the camera. It even rode around town on my bike rack without getting used. It's not surprising that the translucence of the counter hole was evident on the first frame.

Serendipitously, most of the rest of the roll was indoors. That .011-inch high E string is about the same size as the pinhole.

We installed a new bar in the pantry so the egg basket and the mugs hang straight and don't lean against the wall.

The shelf above the stove.

The analog coffee maker. You can see the film's reciprocity failing in the shadows.

Aware that there was an extra-long leader at the end, I needed a way to determine when to stop. For the first time ever, I kept a list of what photographs I'd done. I put an analog kitchen timer to use to avoid having to jump right up and silence a digital alarm.

The silent scream of the through-the-door icemaker and filtered water dispenser. Replaced twice while it was under warranty, it failed again soon after, and the water dispenser as well. It groans occasionally, trying to make ice, just to taunt me.

Shiny titles featured on top the piano.

I have always used Julia Child's "Seventeen-Minute Sit-in" method for hard-boiled eggs. You put them in a boiling pot, then cover it, turn off the flame and let it sit there. Kind of like semi-stand developing. I never see it in those science-lite articles about the best way to boil an egg.

The rest of the salad. This is a pretty tight crop so you can get a good look at the grain.

One of my photographs was accepted into a juried Photography show at the Center for Visual Arts in Wausau, Wisconsin, in the middle of the state. When I drove it up there, as is my wont, I took the opportunity to make some photographs in a new environment. Links: Madtown Monday  ·  All Day Long

The Curator invited me to look around the whole building. They're in a former bank.

Metal.

The chairs were behind a white screen, which nicely reflected the light back onto them. With a ninety-degree angle of view, Morton had no trouble getting back there.

My photograph in the show is of the stairwell in the Overture Center in Madison. Here is another in the series I never intended to start, but just keep happening on them. I opened the shutter for the five-minute exposure and went back into the gallery. There were two people in the adjacent classroom whom I asked if I could look in. They turned out to be the Executive Director and the Accountant. We talked about what a cool room it would be for teaching Pinhole Photography with its huge windows. When I got back to the stairwell, the automatic lights had gone off, for how long I did not know. I stood next to the camera, checking submissions to Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day and waited for another five minutes, which turned out to be about how long the lights stayed on. 

The gallery where the exhibit probably will be.

I then went out on the street. It's not too surprising in the first picture above that the counter hole appeared since it spent hours in the sun, but this day was cloudy and rainy. Within minutes in the brighter light, the counter hole was there. Despite keeping a meticulous record of the photographs, I managed to forget to advance the film and double exposed two of these. 

My plan for the other two rolls is to rate it at ISO 200 and completely line the interior of the camera with backing paper plus some 3M #235 Opaque Photographic Tape over that counter shutter for good measure. I'll start with one and three-eighths turns for the first eight, one and a quarter for the next eight, and just one for the last six. The last roll I quit at 22. If not for the double exposures, 6 of those would have been exposed onto the leader. Still not a bad deal for five bucks.

Morton has two hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Portra NC was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.

Brand new hybrid, very old Super XP2.

 

When it was my turn to choose material for the demonstration camera for the Pre-Pinhole Day workshop at Photo Opp, I picked the generally black carton with high-contrast elements from yet another of Lakefront Brewery's offerings, Riverwest Stein Amber Lager.

Prototype of a Compact 30mm · A modification of the film transport in the Evil Cube and Compact 45 · A Hazy Rabbit and the Bars on North Main Street

The first step is laying out the template on the cardboard to be sure you have enough for every part, and if possible, using specific parts of the design that will be visible on the finished camera. I repeatedly mentioned that the template will be adhered to the other side.

Despite the area covered by the front and back, the most noticeable parts of the exterior are the two shutters and the WinderMinder. Since they're smaller, you have more options for what to use. I demonstrated rough techniques for placing the template where you wanted it on the other side, after turning the cardboard over.

Then I peeled the release paper off the front and back and publicly adhered them to the side with the printing on it. Sigh. 

I don't remember what I did with the pinhole I drilled in the workshop, and installed one from my stash the next day.

Until the day before Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, it was uncertain that we would even be having an event since no one had signed up yet. I didn't know if anybody had bought any film, but I had stocked up for the workshops, so I wasn't concerned. When we started on Sunday, Char Brandis and I discussed whether to use my film or the only ISO 400 Black and White film in the refrigerator, Ilford XP2 Super 400. It had expired over two decades ago, but had probably been frozen since then in some professional's studio. No one had tried it. I shot one roll of XP2 in 1981 when it hadn't existed long enough to be expired. We went with the fresh film, but I couldn't leave 20 rolls of unknown film go untried.

On Pinhole Day, I used color film, but loaded this up in the hybrid-design camera when I got home.

It's designed to run through a professional one-hour C41 lab that used to be on every other street corner instead of getting out messy regular black and white chemistry. I've known for years that you could develop C41 films as black and white negatives with standard developers. The almost universal recommendation for development of outdated or unknown film is stand development in Rodinal 1:100. I do have a C41 kit mixed, but I recently experienced extreme background fogging with outdated film in C41, so I went with the Rodinal. The negatives are, after all, the metallic silver before it gets bleached out and replaced with dyes in C41. There's a lilac cast to the film, but otherwise they look normal

Let's get the nagging question out of the way, what happens if the camera is under the kitchen table and the shutter falls off which you don't notice for a couple of hours, and then point the camera in the other direction while you stretch around the table legs to pick up the shutter and stick it back on the camera?

Can it handle the shutter coming open when you pull it out of your pocket?

The theme for the Fox Valley Photography group this month is Close Up Encounters/Macro. We did this one only a few years ago, but I think it bears revisiting. Until the automatically focused digital prestidigitation of tiny lenses we're used to today, close-up photography was a complex affair involving special or extra equipment and often exposure equations, since your meter might no longer be coupled. With pinhole, of course, you just get closer.

Our friend Gene Leisz's Toad Witch has an incredible peaceful yet majestic expression. Extreme wide angle portraiture is often discouraged, mostly because the expansion of depth gives a fun house extension to one's nose. That's not so noticeable if you don't have much of a proboscis but, in addition to the slightly down angle I needed to use to include her conical hat, it seems to add a touch of melancholy.

The detailed contents of her basket.

Some shiny elements on the bookcase.

A heroic little bunny holding up a candle.

Sunbeams just keep falling on bouquets around here.

Regal expressions in the curio cabinet. The evening sunbeam was illuminating this shelf, but mostly had moved away from the Queen. I left the shutter open to try to get some fill after the very short-lived sunbeam had left. I forgot about it until sometime the next afternoon.

Better go out into the sunshine for some of my human-hand overexposures. A nice selection of shades of grey behind the Barley & Hops pub.

I keep expecting to find a coded message in the seemingly random cement-filled blocks in this window.

There's probably a symbolic message in this labyrinth adjacent to the downtown Mosque.

Oh, yeah, the Shapes theme was last month.

This film seems absolutely brand new to me. I vaguely remember back in the 80's thinking that the highlights blocked up, but I don't see any of that here. Maybe I'll try some more of it and use the C41.

Rive Iber Lage has a .22mm pinhole 30mm from a 6x6cm frame.

Triggered into Manic Expression again

Once again, I've been influenced by a discussion on Photrio, formerly the Analog Photography Users Group. There was a query about the best format to start learning about pinhole. The discussion quickly narrowed to medium and large format, including what I consider a heretical statement: "One can start with 35mm, but more will be in focus than 120 or 4"x5."" (he probably meant "with" instead of "than") I'm a little offended by the dismissal of 35mm, but really dismayed by the value placed on "focus." Nothing is ever in focus in any pinhole photograph. No focusing is going on. I made an impassioned response championing the educational and expressive value of small film, which affords plentiful experimentation.

Then I loaded the mighty-mite Manic Expression Cube, with its one square inch negatives.

The first harbinger of spring.

The last bloom of the amaryllis.

The Coordinating Team for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day—Justin Quinnell, myself, and my son Andy, the web master—appeared on the Lensless and Lo Fi Podcast with host Andrew Bartram. Andy was politely asked procedural questions about the website, but then, after patiently listening to three old men go on about their approaches to pinhole, he got the last word in with a manifesto about the meaning of Pinhole Day to the digital generation. He characterized the inherent uncertainty and lack of precision as "letting the Universe in on the process."

A rose separated from its bouquet and some whimsigoth style.

Catching the evening sunbeam again.

I had just closed the shutter when Sarah came in and said, "I guess I know what you're taking a picture of," and pointed at this very sparkly cardinal 

A dawn sunbeam on the tulips greeted me in the dining room when I came downstairs one morning.

Not unlike a pinhole camera, Leo Fender's Telecaster was designed to be as simple, practical and easy to manufacture and maintain as possible and has remained almost unchanged since 1951. I'm playing the same guitar as Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards. 

Another in the series of the gap between Ames Point and Monkey Island. Looks like it's time for a new T-Dock.

A mother and child exploring the shore.

Another of that north inlet to Millers Bay. The geese are pretty nonchalant about traffic on the lakeshore path, but getting off the bike and setting up a tripod will make them waddle away. I braced the camera against the handlebars.




It must have been the shadows on this raised garden bed that caught my attention.

Another curious composition. The texture of the bricks is nicely rendered by the glancing light. I had just debated whether to finish a medium format roll with the mural or with the passage just out of the frame to the right. The passage won, and the little camera with the color film got the mural.

The windows in the Elsewhere Coffee Shop with all the reflections caught my eye, but after extending the tripod, I decided to wait until there was different lighting. About then, a fashionably dressed young woman came to the door and asked, "Is that a pinhole camera?" She was an analogue user as well. We conversed about the unusual nature of the small format for pinhole, and my exhibit just two blocks away at the Public Library. As she entered the building, she told me, "Keep following your passion." Thought that was a funny comment for a twenty-something to make to a septuagenarian. I had to finish taking the photograph after that. 

A tulip closeup.

The vaguely defined time some people think America was great was probably the post-WWII era, when sexism and racism were encoded into the law and capitalist imperialism was at its peak (and support for public education was universal, go figure). I checked with the World Book Encyclopedia my family got in 1956, about recent economic policy. "Both the countries levying the tariffs and the countries whose goods are prevented from entering are hurt in the process." Not exactly winning.

Chatting with Chris Dearing before the Pre-Pinhole-Day, camera-making event at Photo Opp. He brought a print by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, who turned me on to pinhole.

Making cameras. Once again, everyone made a successful camera, including drilling an appropriately sized pinhole. We had one of those conversations about whether it might be "dreamier" to use a larger pinhole. Alex Galt came just to watch his daughter Frida make the camera, but I talked him into making one of his own. Emma Albrecht, at the right, is a designer on the team that decorates Kleenex boxes. She made her camera out of the same box as the Objet D'Art. She told me the Diversity 30's box design was a team favorite.

The next day was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Char Brandis was Potions Master. Chris and his friend Matt Daniels had developed film before, but not in this century, and never 120.

Giles La Rock and Brandi Grahl were racing to see who could load the reel in the changing tents faster. Giles won and left the scene but I think I can see a hint of his beard against the door,

While the negatives dried, Char made use of the pinhole body cap I made earlier in the day.

Finally, both of us capturing the elusive Giles.

Someday I'm going to do a wet-darkroom event at Photo Opp and make contact prints, but until then, the DSLR set up with Film Lab software is really an efficient way to get a positive file.

I happened to have lunch by myself the next day. It occured to me that with my iPad to my left at a low angle, I was in the same position as Dave Bowman watching a transmission from Earth aboard The Discovery, eating with almost the same fork. This was the last frame on my film. I hope things work out better with the computer than they did for Dave.

The Manic Expression Cube has a hand-drilled .17mm pinhole mounted on an adjustable rising front with 6mm of travel, 24mm from a 24mm x 24mm frame. The film is Kodak Color Print Film 400, developed in a Cinestill powder liter C41 kit.