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.