Living Large

I freely admit stealing that headline from the editor of Scientific American. She was talking about the current issue with articles about dinosaurs, narcissists and Wolf-Rayet stars. The 4x5 Pinhole Lab Camera is my largest camera. Film photography, especially with large format sheets has been described as a dinosaur. Pinhole is often characterized as the evolutionary forebear of photography. Dinosaurs are very old. The expired-in-1981 Plus-X film involved might be called a fossil. And, of course, most of my photography is dependent on one fairly big star, although thankfully nothing like a Wolf-Rayet. The practice of publishing almost every one of my pinhole photographs could be evidence of narcissism. The title fits.

Taking advantage of the easy loading at home, with the film in the 90° angle of view 60mm position and .28mm pinholes, I set out for this giant oak behind the Morgan House. As will become apparent, the strictures and demands of large format sometimes seem a bother but my enthusiasm was restored a bit when this was the first negative I edited.

A very convenient spot to change film is in the little enclosed courtyard/passageway behind the Beach Building. There is a nice stone table to lay everything out in relative privacy. People looking at their phones have walked right by me with my hands in the changing bag. Wondering about what to photograph next, I took notice of what I was actually looking at while rummaging inside the bag. I left the .28 pinholes and put the film at the 117° 38mm position. Also using the rising pinhole with the tripod on the table. The courtyard is not very large but looks like it at this angle of view.

Taking advantage of having everything ready, reloaded at 60mm again and went across Algoma Boulevard and found the saber toothed stone wall of the Trinity Lutheran Church in dappled light.

Changing back at the stone table, switched to 90mm and .34 pinholes for a scene passed earlier on my way to change film from the Morgan House - the Public Safety Building aka The Police. Did the architect intend it to look like a brutalist concrete fortress including the pointy equilateral triangle shape? I once went on a tour which included locking the group in a holding cell. The trees along the street soften it up a little.

Back to 60mm and .28mm pinholes in the darkroom. This pole on the way to the lake seemed to have a large responsibility holding up wires from every direction supported by two sets of guy wires.

Staying at the same angle of view, looking north at the posh sailboats anchored in Miller's Bay.

Taking advantage of a shady picnic table by the lake, I switched to the ultra-wide 38mm without a particular scene in mind. Found this large fluffy hydrangea in front of the sharp corners and straight lines of the neoclassical Yacht Club a few blocks away.

Then I destroyed two sheets. One, by forgetting to secure the shutter when putting the camera in my backpack to transport it to a place I could make the change. Then, flustered when noticing the shutter had accidentally opened, in addition to trying to change the film while sitting with the bag in my lap on a bench, I must have loaded a sheet backwards in the film holder after dropping the film in the bag. There must be something at home to photograph so I can just use the darkroom! 

Moving back to the "normal" angle at 120mm with the .45mm pinholes for a closeup of three of our tomatoes waiting under the Christmas cactus.

Staying at the narrow setting, a minimalist composition of the brass watering can.

Another normal closeup. A piece of clematis, that was the victim of a pruning accident early in the summer, just stuck in a bottle of water, with mixed results.

Just past half way through the box of film, it's getting a little easier. There are a few tricks, like what is the best arrangement in the changing bag. Small things, like which way the film box is oriented, make a big difference. It requires a yoga-like unwavering concentration on procedural rituals. I've found myself closing my eyes and saying the steps aloud as I do them.

The 4x5 Pinhole Lab Camera has slots for the film plane at 38, 60, 90, and 120mm (117° to 56°). With pinholes on the axis and 20mm above it in both orientations. The pinholes in separate mounts can be changed as appropriate. The forty year-old Plus-X was semistand developed in Rodinal, diluted 1:100.

Roadtrip: Thoughts on traveling with a pinhole camera.

The film I used on this trip was Portra 400 in the Evil Cube and Long John Pinhole, Lomography 100 in the Variable Cuboid and Kodak Gold 200 in The Populist. They are quite different and I got sick of messing with color balance to get them to look the same and gave up.

Rock and Rochester • Blue hills, blue water, and black humor • Art is what you can get away with in Western Pennsylvania • The other side of Lake Michigan It sure is hard not to overexpose Portra 400 on a sunny beach, even at f362. It’s hard to make long exposure decisions about film use during a quickly changing sunset. Some of the exposures were measured with Pinhole Assist, some guessed and some for as long as I could get away with leaving the camera with the shutter open. I'm continually amazed that I always get a usable negative, although that sometime takes a little work. When I said that the Classic View at Fallingwater was the only view, I mean by a few inches either way or something was obscured. Guess who people had to wait for during a 1 minute exposure? Eastman House was a great review of the history of photography, despite the limited gallery space. The current history exhibit was a survey with just the work of women photographers. Unlike some fields that included one of the greats in every era. It was cool to see a disassembled No. 1 Kodak that's set up much like the Variable Cuboid including just having sighting lines for viewfinding. It gave me an idea for a new shutter.

A full size tripod is a heavy thing to walk around with, dangerous in close quarters and possibly in someone else’s way but maybe a deterrent to muggers. I wish I could have tried to get pictures in five lanes of traffic at a dead stop. I have done it before. I momentarily thought about it but this time my attention was already fully engaged. Driving in stop-and-go traffic really takes concentration. This has nothing to do with pinhole, but it sure is nice to have 305 horsepower and brand new tires at your disposal when you need it. On the hotel parking forms, I never listed it’s make as Ford. It was always Mustang.

Museum benches are usually located in the middle of the gallery facing a significant art work, but the pinhole view in the other direction often yields a more interesting photograph. I try to avoid putting the camera on the floor because it's too noticeable. Also people tend to look where they're sitting in a public place, but they don't always look where they're walking, expecially in an art gallery. Once you do find a place to put the camera, getting multi-minute exposures is not all that hard when you’re looking around a gallery of paintings. It was weird to lose the New Glarus Populist. In a busy place like the Philly Art Museum steps, it was probably noticed soon because of the shiny bronze-colored tripod, especially since people often watch their feet when walking down a monumental stairway like that. I wonder what they made of it. Last year in Strasbourg I almost lost The Populist and tripod when they fell out of my jacket in a taxi. The driver found it and came running after us. It pays to tip. People do recognize them as cameras because they’re mounted on a tripod but I’m still stunned about how unextraordinary my pinhole cameras are. One assumes people at George Eastman house are interested in photography. We weren’t the only people photographing the Lake Michigan sunset. At Fallingwater they had to wait for me to take a picture with their SLR’s (only a minute). No one said anything. The concierge/desk clerk in Michigan who watched over the Populist never said “Wow, Pinhole! How’s that work?” He just cheerfully agreed. At the toll road service plaza, I looked among the phone accessories for a new tabletop tripod but no luck. Except at the Kodak Kathedral, I never looked to see if anyone had film. The Andy Warhol Museum had Polaroid film and cameras. I saw pinhole camera kits in several gift shops, usually in the children's section. The pinhole photography sure was fun. It makes you look really closely at things and the environment around them. The long exposures and limited frames of film make you really carefully consider whether and from where you want to take that picture.

We’re thinking of airplanes and trains again for our next adventure.

Roadtrip: The other side of Lake Michigan

Since most of our stops were in large cities, we thought a little lakeside resort experience would ease us back into normalcy.

 Previous episodes:    Rock and Rochester      Blue hills, blue water, and black humor       Art is what you can get away with in Western Pennsylvania

Until I was 11 years old, I lived in South Bend, Indiana. About twice a year, we would go up to Warren Dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan to frolic in the waves and the towering dunes. Sparked by that memory, Sarah began collecting a series of Art Deco posters that are in regular rotation in our kitchen promoting Warren Dunes as a getaway from Chicago on the South Shore Line railroad. We decided to make it our last featured destination.

I tried to find accomodation along the lakeshore, and specifically not a chain motel in a cluster alongside the interstate. It was a Saturday night and everything in our range seemed booked with weddings but one of them had a second smaller hotel linked to from their web site. It seemed just the thing, and they had rooms available.

The Gordon Beach Inn, "a casually active, rustic and historic 1920's Inn."  I'd also throw quaint in that description. Both of the men who staffed the desk could easily have been cast in Bob Newhart's innkeeper role, but were much more cheerful. There are separate metal keys for the rooms and the outside doors which they secure at 11:30 pm on weekends. They sent us a letter in the mail confirming the reservation. It was very nice.

Variable Cuboid with 45mm front  - rising pinhole

I had to get a picture of the back porch in the evening sun. My Aunt Stana's cottage on Christy Lake looked exactly like this.

Variable Cuboid with 45mm front - rising pinhole

The Inn is about two blocks from the lake but they have their own private beach accessed by a narrow path between two private homes and a stairway down the bluff. Until the sky cleared while we were on the Ohio Turnpike, it hadn't occurred to us that we would be there for the sunset over Lake Michigan.

I hate to get all Claude Monet about this, but it was notable how the light changed minute by minute as the sun went down. I began with Long John Pinhole to concentrate on where the sun hit the horizon.  It was cloudy in that direction, but The Photographers Ephemeris gave me the accuracy to point with the narrow angle camera in case the sun peeked out. Low tech photography, ya know.

The sun never actually appeared through the clouds, but the sky kept changing. f362 isn't really where you want to be when the light is fading, so I switched to the Variable Cuboid.

A more shoreward view

I think the shoreline, the reflection of the sky in the moving water and how the pinhole records that last wave are more interesting than the sky.

I switched to the Populist to see if I could keep following the more intense visually, but technically dimmer show.

The display just kept getting more intense. We had dinner reservations for our last night on the road so about twenty minutes after the sun had actually set, we headed back toward the hotel. It must have been sunny in Wisconsin because when we got to the top of the stairs, the underside of the clouds was illuminated creating a flaming red psychedelic sailor's delight.

I can't believe how bold I'm getting. After enjoying breakfast in the adjacent dining room, I decided to try to get a picture of the lobby. I put the Populist on the big tripod behind one of the leather couches and explained to the gentleman at the desk what it was. He said he'd watch out that no one bumped it. I went back to the room, finished packing, hauled our stuff out to the car and after exchanging pleasantries about our plans, closed the shutter just as we left. This should help you understand my reference to the Overlook Hotel in a previous post .

Warren Dunes is just a few miles from the Inn. It was still fairly early with the sun low behind the dunes.

We climbed one of the lower dunes. A favorite activity as a child was to climb the steepest face of Tower Hill, the highest one, and run down with our arms windmilling to keep our balance until we fell and rolled down in the sand. A group of 10 year olds demonstrated this while we were there.

Down near the lake this one giant clings to the sand.  The wide angle makes it look a little more isolated than it really is.

It's been there a while from the look of it's gnarly roots. Think I played on it as a child?

It was a brisk October day and there were more people around than I expected. Still, the nearly empty beach and overexposed Portra 400 give it the look of an Antonioni film.

A sailboat passed by just off shore.

I have to conclude with a tribute to our noble steed - union made in Michigan.  It brought us through nightmare congestion on the Boston Beltway in rush hour (starting in Albany!), New York City crossing the George Washington Bridge and downtown Chicago over the Calumet Skyway. We went into the middle of Cleveland, Rochester, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. We went over the Appalachians in continuous drenching rain. It did everything it was asked including escaping from a few tailgaters in almost 90mph traffic. Also seered in memory is the high fidelity voice of Siri over the car audio system, with her omniscient and insistent description of where to go.

There's always the sweet conflict of having a few frames left in the camera. We returned on Sunday night and Camera Casino's weekly trip to the lab happens at 10:00 am on Monday.

On the way downtown, I took a photo of the Oshkosh Publish Museum to make up for leaving and dallying with other museums.

And then to Miller's Bay and Lake Winnebago to make up for flirting with two great lakes and Cape Cod Bay.

Next, random thoughts on traveling with a pinhole camera.

Roadtrip: Blue hills, blue water, and black humor.

The destination for our epic roadtrip was Andy and Kristin's new home in Weymouth, Massachussets. We spent an enjoyable time just hanging out watching YouTube, getting splendidly fed by Andy, visiting a few lovely parks, and one weird museum.

Cushioning Boston's bottom on the southeast is the Blue Hills Reservation, a really big nature preserve in the middle of such a megalopolis.

We went for a walk around Houghton's Pond.

Some rocks floating in the sky.

Leaf-peeping season was just beginning but occasionally we passed an autumnal scene, enhanced in this case by overexposure.

Our guides silhouetted against the lake with the Great Blue Hill and it's historic Public Broadcasting transmission tower in the background. As any good guide should, Andy provided us with the interesting trivia that the tower's location was the source of WGBH's call letters.

On Sunday morning, we drove down to the Cape to visit the illustrator Edward Gorey's home in Yarmouth Port. I read somewhere that an apt contemporary comparison of his oeuvre was to Tim Burton. In the last room on the tour, there was a small desk with some art materials to keep children busy. Andy and Kristin were the only ones south of 60 in the place so it seemed like a safe place to set the little tripod.

When I found myself alone with everyone else two rooms away, I took the opportunity for another view from on top a stack of brochures for the charitable organizations Gorey had left his estate to. The titles to the PBS series Mystery were playing in a continuous loop which gave an appropriate sound track to my surreptitious tripod use.

I first encountered Gorey's work when I processed his compilation Amphigorey in the cataloging department at the UW-Stout Library. It was one of those books where you turn over the title page to check that the call number has been recorded correctly on the next page (go look at a library book) and end up guiltily reading the whole book to see what outrageous thing is going to come next. This tree outside the house was particularly Gorey looking.

Kristin is a major horror movie fan, and Sarah just mined Steven King's stories for one of her contributions to the Haunted Hump Day festival, so references to King's works came up a lot on this trip.  Particularly the Overlook Hotel.  Here, with random application of a shaky tripod, I turn the vaguely disturbing Edward Gorey House into a royal horror show.

We followed with lunch at Longfellow's, a charming Cape Cod pub. I felt it was necessary to have fried seafood.

We stopped on our return for views of the tidal flats of Cape Cod Bay.

Next, Pennsylvania, or not.

Color around town.

While riding around town working in black and white with the new rising front cameras, I occasionally saw some scenes with colorful elements that seemed more appropriate in RGB so the Evil Cube went in my bag loaded with Lomo 100.

One day, Miller's Bay was full of sailboats.

There was some kind of regatta of a specific model of sailboat and they were putting them in the water as fast as they could from the three launch ramps on Miller's Bay. Later on, I counted 39 of them out on the lake. It was a bit chaotic and two nearly collided right in front of me. The action was too fast for pinhole. As I walked off the pier, this backlit boat on a dock nearby was paused to adjust something.  After it sailed away, the man standing in profile asked if the pictures would be posted somewhere. I showed him my pinhole camera and cautioned about the uncertainty of analog pinhole and the time it might take before the film was processed. He found Pinholica on his phone and bookmarked it. Hi!

On my normal route downtown, it's hard to miss these bright red bollards protecting the door in the entirely black back of The Dollar Store.

I usually don't indulge in this sort of thing, but sometimes the randomness and simulation of the passage of time get to you. When setting up the above picture, after measuring the exposure close to the wall, I went back to the camera and found the shutter was open. It must have gotten pulled when it came out of the bag, stayed open and recorded four distinct steps before the shutter was closed.

Behind the Romanesque chapel in Riverside Cemetery, I noticed this red door in the dappled light.  As I measured the exposure a fellow came around the building and remarked about my use of a light meter. He was surprised to learn it was an app on my phone.  He told me he was tending his ancestors' graves from the 1800's. I told him I was photographing the red door. He said he didn't think it was open. I thought "But it's still red."

On what used to be busy Highway 110 but now is sleepy County S, there is a discount construction materials store. Displayed by the road are many giant sculptures of animals and other characters they also sell. It was once featured in Zippy the Pinhead. It's a weird sight but a little creepy and oddly not very interesting to photograph.

I was listening to the Lensless Podcast the other day and Justin Quinnell, my Pinhole Day colleague and owner of the vintage web site pinholephotography.org, waxed on about how more interesting pinhole photos were from cameras placed right on the ground and not the ubiquitous viewpoint five feet up. I can do that.

All with the Evil Cube.  .3mm pinhole 6cm from 6x6cm frame on Lomography 100.

The Variable Cuboid Pinhole Camera System

Evil Cube film path

My favorite camera recently has been the new Evil Cube, and the original Evil Cube before that, admittedly for the silly reason that I like the cuboid shape over the more rectangular aspect of my other cameras. I set out to make a camera that's similar in shape, but more wide angle, 45mm. The problem is that if you divide up a shorter box into a triangular image chamber, there's not enough room left for your 24mm film reels.  You'd have to make the box a little wider, and pretty soon, you might as well just have the original Populist scheme with the film beside a rectangular image chamber.

However if you could put the film plane in front of the reels, you could make the camera as short as you want.

So in order to figure out how to do this, the obvious thing was to check out how it's done in a medium format SLR, my youthful envy of which is driving this whole thing.

In most film cameras you've ever seen with the film plane in the back of the camera, the film path is pretty straight from one reel to the other, although as above, it might have to make two turns.

Medium format SLR film path

In an interchangeable back medium format SLR, the film leaves the right reel clockwise at the top going toward the right, makes about a 140° turn over a roller riding against the backing paper, crosses the image plane with the film facing out and turns around again, to be taken up by the left reel – a little more tortuous path.

Hasselblads have exquisitely integrated, precisely engineered mechanisms made from the best material to make the film move through the camera smoothly. I have a slightly more limited repertoire.

Experience has taught me that the 90° turn the film has to take in the Evil Cube required a little more engineering than the straight path of a Populist, so this meandering path was going to be another step up. That usually means more layers of cardboard.

Another revelation was that once the film was behind the film plane, the camera could be any length you wanted, shorter or longer. If it included a Pinhole Lab Camera style light trap, you could make interchangeable fronts with a variety of distances from pinhole to film. Don't even think about calling them lenses.

Suddenly I have a Variable Cuboid Pinhole Camera System.  Take that, youthful envy!

The back is designed sort of like the Evil Cube Template: a film carrier assembly, inserted into a back-of-the-camera box, with the front box overlapping the back.

The first attempt just used cardboard for the edge that the film rides over. I'm always impressed by how rugged film is being dragged across my cardboard dividers, but this was too much. I could barely nudge it a few millimeters at a time and I was sure there would be marks on the negatives from the compression.

Since 3/8 inch dowels are already part of my pinhole pantry, they might provide a more gentle curve for the film to follow.  I thought about placing plastic drinking straws around them, but they're narrower and I didn't want to reduce the radius of that curve. I did sand the dowel as smooth as I could and gave it a good coat of pencil graphite to make it as slippery as possible.

These are held in place by layers of foamcore above and below the film holder.

The film reels have to be kept parallel, and even with the lubricated dowels, the forces on the take-up reel to twist out of line are considerable. To keep the bottom of the reels in place, I whittled a shorter version of the winders and held them in a double layer of foamcore, and applied more graphite since it has to rotate with the film.  This violates my dislike for small pieces that can get misplaced, but I'll just have to be careful when loading.

One issue with having the film on the image plane in front of the box is that the back of the film with the numbers on it is now an inch and half inside the box with the film reels. I made light proof dividers for the film chambers with as wide a middle bay as possible and used a double-wide shutter to let more light in to see the numbers. In the first prototype, out on a sunny day, it was hard to see them when winding so I glued white paper to the sides to reflect more light.

This part also provides a little structure which helps keep the reels from wandering while you're loading the camera. A t-nut tripod mount is installed in the foamcore layers at the bottom.

The film holder goes into a frame which has a film gate in front of the film to keep it from spooling out into the front of the camera. It also provides an exactly 6x6cm opening so images don't overlap.

The winders are inserted and the frame is placed into the camera back which overlaps the winder collars.

The internal frame extends 10mm out from the back.

The fronts are made to the length you want optically, which slides over the frame and right up against the back.  There's a layer of foamcore (or a couple layers of corrugated cardboard) in the front, 10 mm shorter than the outside, which stops the two parts from sliding any further together.  The entire joint is covered by a light trap which extends over the back all the way to the winders to make it that much more difficult for the sun to sneak through to make mischief.

The camera fronts need to each have a shutter, but Hasselblad does it that way as well. They can, of course, have pinholes sized appropriately for the distance to the film. The viewfinders have to go on the front as well.

The film moves easily enough. It requires a loosen-first-then-wind technique and I've found that it tends to jam up if you tighten the take-up too much so it tries to pull film off the supply.  Better to let it stay loose until you get to the number, and then retighten the supply to flatten the film against the image plane.

When the camera is loaded with film, the fronts have to be changed in the darkroom or a changing bag. I didn't have any trouble doing it in the dark. I get a little dizzy thinking about trying to make a removable dark slide that would allow the front to be changed in the daylight.

I made three fronts.

A 45mm, which started the whole thing, has one of my double shutters and two .29mm pinholes, one on-axis and the other rising 10mm. There is a cardboard triangle on the top for viewfinding.  On the sides the axial and rising pinholes are marked with beaded pins and the image plane with cardboard lines.

Here's the back of The Ruby Owl Tap Room and an acupucturist/holistic health store, with nicely parallel verticals.

The loading bays of the new addition to the Oshkosh Public Library. The film gate is something I have to work on because it obviously didn't prevent the film from bowing out.  The rising front isn't really worth it, to keep your verticals parallel, if the horizontals are wonky.

Another neoclassical building in Oshkosh with a modern addition is the Wisconsin National Life Building, now housing more of the Winnebago Dept. of Human Services. More pinhole fun with the curvy film. A guy came out of the building and we spoke about the contrast between the two structures, but he never mentioned I had a cardboard box on the tripod.

I made a 20mm front as an extreme example, although you could go as short as a 10mm. At this short a distance, in a regular camera with a 24mm film reel limiting the depth of the camera, you'd have to inset your pinhole into the camera body. I have seen this done. While trying to make the matched pair of pinholes for the 45, I made a .23mm, so I just used it for this one despite it being a hair big for this distance. At a 117° angle of view, it didn't seem worth it to put a rising pinhole on it. I reused the original shutter of Long John Pinhole and was surprised to find the edges of the shutter appeared in the images.

Here's my standard test shot of the entire north wall of the living room. Exposure was apparently five minutes from a quarter before until ten to nine. I could touch the mantle from where the camera was. I have long arms, but still... 

It's always fun to see how close you can get. This is about two and a quarter inches from Minnie's Nose.

The camera is just over my head with the tripod strapped to the shelf of the baker's rack with a bungee cord. This was adjusted for overall brightness and contrast, but otherwise left alone so it's a fair representation of the the degree of vignetting. I was expecting a circle with totally black edges.

As high as the tripod would go looking up under the arbor covered with morning glory vines. Surprisingly it was close enough to not have the rest of the yard visible.

On the extreme other end, I made a 200mm.  In the Some Assembly Required column on the Boston based Don't Take Pictures website, I saw a 600mm long 6x7cm format pinhole camera with a Pro back and an old box camera front. The camera maker, Jeff McConnell, had a really big pinhole on it because he wanted it fast enough to hand hold for street photography. That's the only other pinhole camera I've seen with a length to film format ratio this extreme. I just used a trusty #10 needle-diameter .5mm pinhole, which really isn't that small for this long a camera.

A long camera let's you close in to relatively distant compositions. The camera is tilted up a bit but the slightly converging verticals aren't the first thing you notice. I didn't think it worth it to put a rising front on this long a camera either.

Don't Take Pictures did a post on Long John Pinhole. She used a photo I took of a water feature in the Paine Garden and quipped that the long camera allowed me to get the shot without getting into the pool. Well, I had one leg of the tripod in the water for this one. The thing that caught my eye were the reflections of the vines in the water, and with a shorter camera, I would have had to have suspended the camera on a boom to get it to the right spot. This is at f400 with Arista.edu 100 so this was about an hour exposure. I made lunch.

Long cameras also make getting closer easier without getting the camera in your light (although I didn't have any trouble with Minnie and Mickey).  Not really a problem with this backlit dahlia in any case. The flower is about 120mm across so this is a 2:1 macro shot. This is probably heresy but I'd like it to be a little crisper. I think I'm going to change to a .4mm pinhole and see what develops.

I found several dumb errors in the template which I have to fix, and then the ultimate test will be to see if I can build a new back that fits into the fronts I already made and new fronts fitting into this back as well.

I'll probably do a "building-of" post when I make those, but it might be awhile.  This much engineering takes a lot of cardboard and we have to eat enough cereal and crackers to get the materials. (Here’s the link to that “building of” post)