Stella! Stellaaa!

When I made the New Glarus Populist, I fessed up that I hadn't actually tried the revised 10th Anniversary Populist template for the 35mm camera.  Well, now I have to leak that I also didn't try the new 6x9cm template either.

If anybody actually tried to make it, I apologise that there were a couple mistakes

Other than the size of the image chamber, the thing that distinguishes it from the 6x6cm is where the counter hole, with its shutter, is. If you look carefully at the picture above, you'll notice a patched hole just under the A in Artois.  I put the hole on the wrong side on the template. If you lined up the first number in it, you would already have advanced past most of the frame. Incidentally, this is assuming the supply goes on the right side as you're looking at the back of the camera.  If you preferred to load your film on the left, the hole would go at the top left, but then the numbers would be upside down.

The other mistake is that I didn't modify the film counter shutter itself for the new position.  In the 6x6cm cameras, the counter hole is in the middle and the shutter is exactly the same as the taking shutter on the other side. With the counter hole at the bottom like this, that shutter would extend below the bottom of the camera.

I've fixed both of these issues.

I chose this box because the design was symmetrical and about the right size to fit on a camera this size.  I have to admit I thought Stella Artois meant something like Artistic Star, but then I looked it up and found that Artois was the last name of the guy who founded the company.  Oh well, it sounds a little like DuBois, which would have been Stella Kowalski's maiden name, although I've never read or seen A Streetcar Named Desire. Coincidentally, the beer is very much like Supper Club.

The template has the pinhole 60mm from the film plane, but I hated the only roll I ever shot with a 6x9cm camera at that distance, so this time I cut it down to 45mm. Since I still had all the paint I used to make Goldberry's finder beads gold, and this carton had gold elements, I painted the map tacks again. Also, that makes this thing pretty wide angle.

Mr. Pinhole says .27mm is optimal at 45mm, but as usual, I made the pinhole a little smaller, .24mm which makes it f180 or so.

I've found a roll of Arista.edu 400 that's been knocking about in the bottom of a box for about 10 years and decided to use that to test the camera. I'm not sure if it's just been bad luck, but I've never really liked the results I got with this film.  It strikes me as having a pretty limited latitude, and especially blocking up to white pretty suddenly when you should still have some grey scale left. There's also a pretty minimal amount of shadow detail.

Since this seemed like a fairly fast combination, I started in the kitchen with the tableau Sarah set up in the shelf under the cupboards.  One thing I've always liked about this display was how excited the little Dutch violinist was to be playing with Metallica, but I let the mouse from the audience get in the way and you can hardly tell he's there.

The sun was shining in the Sun Room while I read the Times the next morning. Funny how the shadow of the camera is right on my face.

Ya gotta get out in the sunshine to make sure a camera is light proof, so I went out for a bike ride.  First stop was the lions at the library.

Down a few blocks to Opera Square.

The passageway on the River walk under the Wisconsin Street bridge.  There was a fisherman in a red jacket just on the other side, but he kind of disappears in black and white. Another unfortunate merger - there's a seagull that sat nice and still on the street light just on the other side of the bridge, but he's almost lost against the railing.

The old train station on the grounds of the Oshkosh Public Museum.

Across the street, the patio of the Paine Art Center.

And, the pergola which leads to the woodland path.

Happy Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day this weekend, everyone!

The ice recedes

Inspired by my walk across Lake Winnebago, and a maybe a little bit by Daphne Schnitzer's views of the Mediterranean, I've been keeping track of the ice as it recedes from the shore.

The ice is always thinner on Millers Bay with a rougher texture and puddles of water forming on surface as the ice melts.

Out on the Ames Point breakwater that encloses the north end of the bay, the ice looks much more solid on the lake, but with open spots right around the end of the point.

Looking back toward Oshkosh, there are open channels.

A week later, the north end of the bay looks like it's all open water, but the gulls standing on the surface betray the location of the remaining ice.

Just a hundred yards or so down the shore, the south end of the bay remains locked in ice.

Over on the actual lake shore, a Christmas tree marks where there had been an open crack, which seems to have healed, although the bridges have been removed and the roads abandoned for almost a month.

Looking out over the lake, you can still see the line of trees that marked the road receding into the distance.

Four days later, the lake was completely ice-free. I think I'd like to do some more work with the ice, but despite the forecast of a major winter storm over the next few days, it's going to have to wait until next year.

All with the Moderately Telephoto Pinhole Camera in a Plain Brown Wrapper, loaded with Ektar 100.

Across the ice on foot

For the past several years, my former colleagues, Maureen Muldoon and Peter Westort have walked across Lake Winnebago on the first weekend of sturgeon spearing. I've never been on Lake Winnebago even in a boat and I've wanted to go along ever since I heard about them doing it, and this year I thought I was ready. I wasn't really able to do this before this year, but I was pretty sure my new steel knees could handle it. 

This year Peter had a visiting professorship in Peru so he couldn't make it, but another colleague, Bill Wachholz, and his wife Margaret, volunteered to join the adventure.

Lake Winnebago is 10 miles wide directly across at Oshkosh.

We started at Maureen's house several blocks from the lake.

We left the shore at the end of Merritt Avenue at the south end of Menomonie Park, about where we saw the ice shoves when the ice broke up last year.

Merritt Avenue doesn't so much end as just continues out onto the lake. It was snowing just a bit and you could barely see the other shore.

Much of the traffic on the lake is ATVs and snowmobiles, so just off shore is a pretty sizable parking lot full of trucks and trailers.  Seems a little weird to concentrate that much weight in one spot, but the ice is suppose to be 20 inches thick and seems to be handling it.  Here Maureen takes advantage of one to put on her ice cleats.

Bill checks his cleats on the ice.

The roads are maintained by various fishing clubs around the lake.  There are several giant cracks crossing the lake that push up shoves. The clubs place temporary bridges across them. One of the gaps going north and south is just a few hundred yards off shore.

Trucks and ice shanties are clustered around the lake and get thinner the farther you get out on the lake.  This is about the last bunch about three miles out. (I have no idea what the streak in the upper right is.)

Occasionally the sun would pop out and highlight the relief of the snowdrifts and tracks.  The road parallels one of the large cracks that goes all the way across the lake, silhouetted at the top of the frame.

There are less severe cracks of various widths every several yards along the way.

The major cracks, and the road, are marked by discarded Christmas trees placed on the ice every tenth of a mile. Major waypoints are marked by multiple trees.  Here, five miles out, we're right in the middle.

Despite the emptiness of the middle four miles, occasionally a set of tracks would head off the road.

Approaching the shore at Quinney.

We rewarded ourselves with beer, burgers and fries at a basic Wisconsin bar a few yards past the shore, and got a look at at least one sturgeon being registered, although at just over three feet long, a rather small one.

All with the Prepopulist, .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x50mm frame.

Slightly distant domestics

With the Moderately Telephoto Pinhole Camera in a Plain Brown Wrapper.

In Eau Claire when we first lived together, we passed this alabaster Buddha in a store window on the way from our apartment to the Joynt. Sarah got it for me for my birthday.

You can tell from his hat that it's winter.

Glassware is a common assignment in photography class. Flirting with refraction here again.

Butter in a white dish. Not as common as eggs, but a popular food assignment in color photography class.

I can't unsee that face.

I seem to have a thing for squares lately.

Another tissue inspired composition.

Birthday roses.

Flowers just to brighten the table in January.

The cats' perch in the sun room windows.

Upstairs again. A calmer view of the bath products.

And, a sunny window.

All with the Moderately Telephoto Pinhole Camera in a Plain Brown Wrapper. .33mm pinhole 120mm from 6x6cm frame.  Portra 400.

A moderately telephoto pinhole camera in a plain brown wrapper

I kind of liked the images from the moderately telephoto pinhole camera I made a few months back, but the look of the camera was kind of odd, and it was made by modifying a camera that didn't transport film as well as I'd like. So I edited the template, and made a classic 6x6cm 120 Populist 120mm long.

Link to directions    Link to templates

Because the inner box template is so big, even on tabloid paper, it's printed in two parts and you have to glue them aligned with each other on your cardstock. (It should just barely fit printed on A3 paper - make sure to print 100% and not fit to paper)

I had to go across folds of a 24 can beverage carton to get a piece of card big enough. I'm so over making cameras with random package printing on them, so I made this one with the plain side out.

In the classic Populist scheme, the front and rear boxes are the same depth, but when I got this together, it was almost impossible to get apart, even with the thumbgrips.

I realized I could get a much better grip if I could just grasp the whole box, and I didn't need that much overlap to make it light tight, so I cut it back to where one of those folds from the original carton made a slight ridge. It slides apart quite easily now.

I've edited the template to reflect that.

The viewfinders aren't complete triangles, although I had cut them out before making this decision and it had a neat Spaceman Spiff look, the pointy tips were a snagging risk and I went with William of Occam's recommendation since the shorter line segment defined the angle of view just fine.

You may recall some discussion of the size of the pinhole.  The old camera had a .3mm, much too small for the distance to the film, but with the new camera I drilled a .33mm, a little closer, but still smaller than the mathematical ideal of .462mm. Look at the pictures below and tell me it would be sharper with the bigger pinhole.

This pinhole looks a little ragged at first glance, but if you look the actual edge of the hole, it's pretty smooth and round.

Because the camera's so long and I can't get my hand down to the front, I made a little part to attach the pinhole to and then push to the front of the camera.  It also makes it easy to change the pinhole if I did want to experiment with Lord Rayleigh's equations.

I think it works pretty well. Here's a roll of Lomography 400.

An oak leaf which had attached itself to the side of our house.

Three pumpkins on the bakers rack. Technical note: It's often said that limited depth of field to isolate an object in the foreground is a technique not available to the pinhole photographer.  However if the foreground is still (inside or too heavy to blow around) and the background is "blurry," it's pretty much the same trick visually.  Is it still bokeh when it's caused by motion and not out of focus?

One big pumpkin. More mōshonburā there in the background. Bokeh is kind of a refractionist term.

A small pumpkin and a lemon on the kitchen table.

An enthusiastic potato.

Can you believe I've never photographed the garden at the Paine with a pinhole camera before?

A tree near the entrance to the woodland path.

A pair of chairs on the lawn.

A bench in the event area.

A sculpture fountain in the brand new formal garden.

and, one of the little water features.

I expect I'll be using this camera again.