Eclipse Lunargraphy and other trails

A couple of things prompted this post. Recently on the Pinhole Photography Facebook group, Janet Neuhauser posted an all night exposure of the trail of the full moon and noted that it didn't pick up anything but the moon's trail. The other thing is that a total lunar eclipse will occur next Sunday night that's visible from all of North and South America.

In April 2014 there was a total lunar eclipse in the wee hours of the morning. I couldn't bring myself to stay up all night to see it. I just put The Populist out after dark and before twilight began the next morning, closed the shutter. I never saw the eclipse at all.

That night Mars was shining at magnitude -1.4 and pretty near opposition so it also passed all the way through the scene during the night. In the full frame you can just barely see it. It's easier to see in a close up detail.

This image is also notable because even in eclipse, the moon was bright enough to be recorded and the reddening is clearly visible. The extremely overexposed full moon trail on the little 35mm negative shining through the pines also makes for a dramatic image.

Encouraged by my success in April, I tried again later that year in October. This time the moon set while it was still in eclipse.

A year later at the end of September there was another total lunar eclipse that began not long after moonrise. I decided to go over and sit in Menomonie Park to watch it. I thought maybe I could get a reflection of the trail in Lake Winnebago. The eclipse was just beginning its partial phase before the sky was dark enough to open the shutter

Duh! Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection. After the moon rose a bit, the reflection was no longer bouncing back to my position on the lake shore. This is a fairly severe crop of The Populist's 35mm negative which really emphasizes the overexposed full moon trail. The film was Walgreen's 400 film so it was even more blown out than the earlier moon tracks done with the 200. The red color of the lower lobe is curious. I would ascribe it to haze and light clouds but it doesn't look like that in other pictures done that night.

I also had the 6x6cm Glenmorangie Evil Cube to see what it looked like with a larger negative.

This was with Portra 160, slower than the film in the Populist and it's about a stop slower camera. So the trail is less extreme and there's just a bit of a glow reflecting in the lake. Without the overexposure of the moon's reflection near the opposite shore, it captured a few lights over in Calumet County.

I had my 10x50 binoculars along to entertain myself during the long event. I took advantage of the darker skies and just scanned around the sky. A notable memory was my accidental discovery of Uranus just few degrees from the moon (verified by Sky Safari). It's hard to believe no one noticed this kind of odd fuzzy green star moving around before William Herschel.

This next image is not an eclipse, but again referencing Janet's post on Facebook, I was shoveling snow one morning before dawn with the moon and an extremely bright Jupiter setting in the west. It was also near opposition, shining at -2.5. As usual The Populist was in my pocket. I set it on the big pile of snow next to the driveway and opened the shutter while I finished shoveling. In addition to the moon trail, I also picked up the trail of the giant planet.

Twilight was beginning so although it was brighter than Mars during the eclipse, it's not much clearer in the whole negative but you can see it in a full resolution detail. The beginning of the moon trail looks like it might be the shape of a waxing crescent but it had to be full to be setting just before dawn and I can't really explain why it looks like that.

I wasn't the first one to do a lunar eclipse pinhole photo. In 2007, on f295, a participant with the nom-de-internet Monophoto posted a lunar eclipse image. A year later, Gregg Kemp posted a picture of an eclipse in his gallery of landscapes with moon trails. Working on this post, I also found a gallery of Lunargraphy by Csaba Kovacs.

These weren't my first experiments with pinholing the moon. On the Pinhole Visions forum, therefore prior to 2004, there was an occasional special assignment topic. The theme for one of these was "motion" and I remember thinking it would be cool to do it on the largest scale possible. With a 4x5 camera and photographic paper I did an all night shot of the moon rising over the house. I no longer have that image, but a decade or so later, I recreated it with The Populist, this time adding interest with a Mustang in the foreground.

The current prediction for the weather next Sunday is mostly sunny so I may get another chance at a total lunar eclipse. (Although it hasn't been clear for more than an hour or two since mid-December.) Winter in Wisconsin is usually a pretty good time for pinhole lunargraphy. The sky will be completely dark by 7 PM and stays that way until at least 6 AM, even facing east toward the rising sun. At mid-eclipse the moon will be almost due south and quite high in the sky. Venus rises at 3:54 AM at magnitude -4.4 and Jupiter at magnitude -1.8 rises at 4:40 AM so they might be at least partially within the angle of view as well by the time I have to wake up and close the shutter.

Later edit.

I made three images of that eclipse in 2019

A stereo image with a 60mm long camera with two 6x6cm image chambers. (Set up for crossed eyes)🧐

A panoramic image with two side by side 35mm Populists pointed in slightly different directions.

And one with a wide angle 30mm pinhole to film camera on a 6x6 frame.

In 2020, I finished Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day with an exposure of the crescent moon and Venus setting in the West.

Roadtrip: Art is what you can get away with in Western Pennsylvania

The evening after we returned from the Blue Hills Reservation, I took my little Promaster tripod out of my pocket and one of the legs had broken off. It has been almost constantly with me since 2011 and has been the support for half the photographs on this blog. Farewell, trusty old friend.

I had brought a spare along, the foot of which you can see in the lower left hand corner of the image above.

I had two 35mm Populists with me, The Populist and The New Glarus Populist. Both were loaded so when one ran out of film, I could just switch to the other without everyone having to wait for me to reload. This occurred while we were visiting Cape Cod.

We went back to Wisconsin through Pennsylvania.

We spent a day in Philadelphia. I had great fun photographing some notable sights including interiors of Independence Hall, a sunbeam in Betsy Ross's bed room and lunch at the reproduction of the historic City Tavern. I finished the roll at the Philadelphia Art Museum on their evening hours night. Can you see where I'm going with this?

Exhausted after a day of history and art appreciation in 86°F temperatures, we sat down at the bottom of the famous Museum steps to call an Uber. Since I had been on the prowl for opportunities, I had the camera on the tripod in my back pocket. When I sat down on the concrete step, I took camera and tripod out and set them down beside me. After clicking Confirm Pick-up on Uber, it said the driver's arrival time was one minute! I looked up and saw him waiting in the drop-off zone rolling slowly ahead looking around for his fare. Fearing he would drive away, I jumped up and ran toward him. When we got to the hotel after a 15-minute, 2-mile drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic, I noticed I didn't have the camera. Or a working desktop tripod.

I have this fantasy that someone will find the New Glarus camera, discover pinhole, and submit a picture with it to Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

The next day we drove through the mountains in copious falling water for about four hours.

Our first destination on the other side was Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece of domestic architecture.

We purposely arrived early to have a snoop around the grounds and get some photographs at our leisure. I took along the medium format cameras and the big Manfrotto.

On our way to the Classic View, we accidentally went to the Bird's Eye View instead. Despite being partially obscured, it probably gives the best look at the general layout of the place.

The Classic View, which the guide later described as the image on the cover of every book about Fallingwater ever published. It's about the only view in the steep, winding and heavily forested Bear Run Valley. Everyone expected Wright to build the house here to get the view of the waterfall, but he thought he could get away with hanging it above the stream. I love that the trees form an opening that seems to perfectly frame the house and then turns to follow the creek. It's probably managed to look that way, but a nice touch.

We returned our cameras and tripod to the car. Camera bags and tripods were specifically discouraged from being carried on the tour. I'm not complaining. You get to walk right into every room. No velvet ropes. I've had to manage a tripod among precious artifacts and it's not my idea of a vacation. Photography is allowed on the grounds but not in interiors and not on the terraces. I'm sure people would fall off taking selfies. Inspired by Wright's structural and design uses of the environment and Andy Warhol's cheeky quip, which I saw on a book cover in the gift shop just before we started, I went ahead to see what I could get away with by resurrecting my little recently created bipod and making do with whatever surfaces I could find to support The Populist.

The Visitor Center, designed by one of Wright's students, echoes his intention to make sure you notice that you're out in the woods.

The tours meet their guide on a little bridge across Bear Run, which offers the second most photographed view of Fallingwater. Wright used semicircles as accents in many places including the tops of the railings on the bridge which makes it an unstable place to try to hold a bipod against. In addition to the pinholey movement, the not quite parallel camera results in some classic wide angle stretch of space which gives a little instability to Wright's geometric arrangements.

After the tour, I of course took a picture of the back of the house. What got me about this scene was how Wright used a big native rock outcrop to support some of the structure of that terrace.

There are many woodsy paths to wander through the grounds. About half the trees near the house are rhododendrons. It must be crazy in the spring.

Going back to the Visitor Center over the bridge, I got a little more rectilinear, but still pretty shaky, version of the cantilevered terraces.

Now on to Pittsburgh for the giant retrospective of the quipster himself, The Andy Warhol Museum.

The presentation is mostly in chronological order which begins on the seventh floor. This is the top of the stairway.

There are three large galleries per floor, plus a central hallway.

The stairs on the rest of the floors are different because they have to go both ways.

One gallery contained his piece Silver Clouds, a black room with a dozen or so large pillows of silver mylar filled with something to make them neutrally bouyant, being moved around by a fan with spot lights shining on them making really bright highlights, occasionally escaping out into the hallway. Do you think he thought of pinhole photography when he designed that?

Otherwise he didn't do much sculpture, and he didn't do this one. It's by Keith Haring, probably inspired by Warhol's Elephant series.

To get the camera to tilt up a bit, I was leaning it against my jacket, another sort of unstable support. In this gallery, trying to be gentle, I didn't quite get the shutter pulled out all the way, and blocked part of the pinhole.  But it works pretty well graphically, so let's see if I can get away with it.

Next, sandy shores in the Midwest.

Summer in the City

This July we have had almost continuously partly sunny skies with all sorts of dramatic clouds.

I set forth on several rollin' pinholin' adventures to take advantage of the interesting backgrounds.

Built as a response to Wisconsin's first-in-the-nation legislation establishing technical schools, The Beach Building was the Orville Beach Manual Training School from 1912 until the '70's. It was converted to offices, and now apartments. It was designed by noted local architect William Waters, but the front is probably more typical of his work than this back corner.

The Mainview Apartments, originally the Hotel Raulf, looms over the local office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

You can always depend on the Catholic Church for architecture. While I was taking this a preschooler was clinging onto the playground fence thirty yards away yelling "What are you doing?" over and over as loud as he could.  I told him I was taking a photograph. He ran away toward an unseen companion repeating "He's taking a photograph!" at similarly high volume.

Where the hotel parking structure joins the hotel.

The loading docks at the Convention Center.

The Canadian National railroad bridge in it's normal raised position silhouetted against the sky.  This was about a 4 second exposure.  There were at least two boats in the picture that moved too much to be recorded, but the ducks in the lower right stayed put.

This one cloud seemed to make a composition all by itself.  Looks more like a ducky than a horsie to me.

Sailboat masts at the Yacht Club.

Clouds over the four backstops at East Hall Field.  This cloud looks more like an Angry Bird.

The front of a building for a change.  Merrill School. This is the elementary school side.  The second floor windows on the right were Andy's fourth grade classroom where we did a pinhole experience. This is the door they came out of to take their photographs and go back to the improvised darkroom in the copier room in the basement.  What originally caught my eye was the little garden plot planted by students and now completely overgrown in mid-July,

The corner of the middle school side under the shade of this really giant oak.

Our unruly magnolia doing it's impression of a Picasso sculpture

The above were done with the new Evil Cube.  I confess that I used the rising pinhole for all of them.

I also had the Moderately Telephoto Pinhole Camera in a Plain Brown Wrapper with me.  As with the last roll through this camera, in addition to clumsy double exposures and bumping the camera, I also had what I thought were some pretty odd low contrast exposures.  I now think this camera is not totally opaque but I did get a few exposures that were OK.

The Mainview Apartments again, although this time the slight fogging changes the tone and makes it look like it's about to be flattened by an alien death ray.

The Canadian National Bridge lowered with a train going over it. The barriers came down just as I got there.  I tried to get the tripod detached and set up with the camera on it while still sitting on the bike and nearly fell over three times. The train was nearly done by the time I was ready. I held onto the tripod to keep upright and seem to have given it a bit of a shake, but that gives it a kind of ghostly historic vibe.  This was the location of the first railroad bridge to cross the Fox in 1861 carrying all those wood and paper products from the factories powered by the river between Oshkosh and Green Bay to markets in the rest of the country.

There was another railroad bridge up river a mile, but it was dismantled around the turn of the millenium. The area across the river used to be pretty heavy industry centered around the Universal Foundry. It was a brownfield contamination site for years. About the time the bridge came down, the state and city created a program to clean up such sites and provide tax incentives and it's now all giant apartment buildings. The water tower is brand new. They just took down the old one last month. The tripod was sitting on a rocky breakwater on the riverbank.  My first attempt was ruined when I nearly fell in the river and grabbed the tripod for support again. I also took a second exposure before I realized I had turned the camera a little and so took this third one. A good bit of why I think the camera isn't totally opaque is that these exposures made rapidly one after another don't show much sign of the fogging.

Seduced by another cloud. Again, the previous frame was very dense and low contrast, but I was under a pretty thick cloud when I made this seconds later and it's a completely normal exposure.

The first twelve (!) with The New Evil Cube. .3mm pinhole 6cm from 6x6cm frame located 15mm above the axis of the film plane, with Kodak TMax 100.

The last four with The Moderately Telephoto Pinhole Camera in a Plain Brown Wrapper. .33mm pinhole 12cm from 6x6cm frame located 12mm above the axis of the film plane, except the one of the train which was done with the on-axis pinhole, with Ilford HP5.

Both developed in Rodinal 1:50

Building the evil cube template

The template has been revised and updated directions are at this link.

The techniques for building the Evil Cube template are very similar to my other cameras that are covered in the 10th Anniversary Populist post.  If you were thinking of making one, it would probably be a good idea to look that over if you're not familiar with how I make cameras.

 Link to Evil Cube Template description.   Link to templates.  Link to 10th Anniversary Populist post

The Evil Cube template is set up on four sheets of letter size paper, and it will fit on A4. The largest part is almost 11 inches so it still takes a fairly large cereal box to make, and you'll probably need two of those. Of course the first step is to glue the template to your card stock, and when it's dry cut out the parts and all the holes. The grey areas are the glued surfaces. Remember if you're using a box with a glossy surface, sand or otherwise roughen it if it's the side that's getting glued.

The image chamber is the most complicated part to fold and glue.  It might be a little longer than your printer area, but they're pointy corners so it should be pretty easy to recreate. Remember to print at 100% and not "fit to print." It should fit pretty comfortably on A4 paper. There are three steps that need to be done in order.

The first is to glue the double layer that makes up the sides of the image chamber. Make sure to tightly crease the fold and in order to clamp it, you may have to fold the remaining end of the flap over your clamps to get the edge well clamped.  As always, it's best to get the entire surface adhered.

Next, fold it into the shape of the image chamber.  One of the trapezoidal sides is only partially grey. That's where the tripod mount will be glued and that one goes on the inside, the entire grey end is the outside.

The last part, which makes the camera front stiffer and restricts the movement of the film reel, is folded and glued.  The front of this structure should be a flat surface - you might have to adjust it a little.  The best way I found to clamp it was with a rubber band around it vertically.

The image chamber is then glued to the film holder to create the internal assembly. I forgot to take a picture with it clamped like that but the template is pretty well marked where everything goes. Make sure it’s aligned correctly with the lines on the template and the tripod mount hole.

The stop which holds the bottom of the film reel in place is made from a double layered piece of your cardboard.  Note also that the flap at the left isn't glued.  You need to open it to get the film reel in and out.  It just folds closed and is held there when the assembly is placed in the camera.

Notice there is a gap between the film reel and the top of the holder. A spacer is necessary above the takeup reel to make sure it stays down against that stop at the bottom to keep it parallel when winding the film. Make as many copies of the film holder spacer to fill that gap so the film reel just fits. It took four layers to fill the gap for this camera but that may vary depending on the accuracy of your folds and the thickness of your card.

Glue the spacers in.  Use a scrap piece of dowel to make sure these are aligned with the winder hole.

Also do this on the supply side.

Cover the rear edges of the film holder that the film rides over with some tape to make a smooth edge.

To make sure you've got a tight fit, fold the camera back around the internal assembly with the flaps on the inside. In order to prevent them from getting glued together, I always wrap some wax paper around the internal part first.

Then, this time with the flaps on the outside, again separating them with wax paper, fold and glue the front over the back (leave the internal assembly in there so you don't crush the back when you clamp it.)

The winders are my standard 3/8 inch dowels with the end sculpted to fit into the slot of a 120 reel. They're exactly the same as with the 10th Anniversary Populist  so I won't repeat it here.  With my camera I also glued some cork bottle stoppers to make it a little easier to wind, but that's not really necessary.  If you do put the knobs, make sure to leave a gap between the winder collar and the knob for the front to slide between.  This is all well illustrated in the directions for building the Variable Cuboid.

The tripod mount is also the same as the Populist other than the shape to fit the image chamber.

Of course, if you're not absolutely sure your card and template is opaque, now is the the time for a few coats of matte black paint. Also remember to cover that edge of the image chamber the film rides over with tape or cloth.

This camera is set up to have a rising front pinhole. The pinholes are taped right onto the front of the internal assembly.  The optimal diffraction is just under .3mm by the way. Careful not to cover one with the other. You can, of course, install just one pinhole, but I'd either not cut the second hole in the first place, or cover the hole with tape.

The shutter is exactly the same as with the 10th Anniversary Populist, except it's stretched to cover both pinholes, and the moving shutter itself is cut in half.  I liberally cover the surface between the two halves with pencil lead graphite so when you pull the handle for one, friction doesn't pull them both open. It's symmetrical around the horizontal axis so you could mount it for use by whichever hand you prefer. There's no reason why you couldn't make a second pinhole and use this on any of my other 120 cameras.     

It's important to make sure the film reels are down where that stop will hold them in place when you load the film, place the back over it, and insert the winders.

Film advance requires loosening the supply and then tightening the take-up.  Remember to tighten both winders so the film is flat before making an exposure if you want to avoid some unpredictable pinhole fun.

I used beaded pins for viewfinders, I've included some center pinhole finders on the template, but I can't quite think how to make a flat finder for both pinholes except by drawing lines.

Now go out and show everyone how cool you are with your classy cubical medium format camera.