Goldberry

One day Sarah and I were breaking down shipping boxes to be recycled. I opened one in which Sarah had received a very nice scarf. It was rather thin for corrugated cardboard and the inside was completely lined with gold foil.   My first thought was: "You could make a pinhole camera out of that."

I asked Sarah, if I were to make her a new camera for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, what characteristics would she like it to have. I've made two cameras for her for Pinhole Day before.  One was wide horizontally but kind of narrow vertically, and other was rather wide angle.  She replied: "I'd like one that sees normally like I do."

It so happens that I've never made a 120 Populist in the normal range.  I've always had a funny reaction to that word normal, and I never really did a lot of photography with a normal lens or pinhole. It does sound dreary. Normal. I shouldn't knock it. Cartier-Bresson, Kertész, Frank and a lot of others did most of their work with normal lenses.

So it's 80mm long on a 6x6cm frame with 120 film.

For winders, we looked through the collection of Scotch, cordial and olive oil corks and Sarah chose this pair from bottles of Port.

The viewfinders are map tacks that I dipped in Gold Testors Paint.  It was a little weird re-encountering a product that I had used to paint model cars when I was 10 years old in the exact same little bottle with the same labeling it had almost 60 years ago.

The corrugated cardboard turned out to be not bad to work with.  It was a little thicker than cereal boxes so I had to modify the back a bit on the fly while I built it, but it fits together pretty well.

I drilled a .32mm pinhole.   As usual, smaller than the calculated optimum, but remember that's a measure of diffraction, not sharpness. That makes it f250.

I've learned my lesson not to give someone a camera that hasn't been tested.  I thought since the camera looked like gold, I would pair it with something that featured silver, it's neighbor one row up on the periodic table - black & white Arista.edu 100. Kind of a slow combination, but there were only a few hazy clouds and there's a big star fairly nearby that really lights up the landscape.

You know, the River Withywindle is named for the willows that grow on it's banks.

It's not Middle Earth, but I ventured forth on a journey around Oshkosh.

Looking over the ice on Miller's Bay.

Where Andy went to Kindergarten.

First Grade, down at the other end of the building.

Over to the University.  The shadow of a stair rail rippling down the steps of Halsey Science Center.

Just to the right, Buckstaff Planetarium.  Doesn't that name sound a little Hobbitish?

Down the mall to the modernist Polk Library in whose subterranean halls I labored for three decades.

A solar panel giving another spin on sensitivity to light.  This is starting to look more like science fiction.

Down the river to the somewhat brutalist former shopping mall which now houses several large businesses.

Just across the alleyway, along the river, the ramp to the hotel parking structure.

Further down toward the lake, the railroad bridge.

And from there, back again, up north past our first home in Oshkosh in the Dale School.

Looks like the camera is as good as gold, although it does still seem a little like magic.

ArtsCore Summer Colony

My pinhole workshop for teachers was part of the 3 day ArtsCore summer colony.

To see how I fit into the whole program, and meet the participants, I attended the opening session on Monday morning.

It was held at the Paine Art Center and Arboretum carriage house and conservatory.

This might show a lack of editorial discipline, but here's a closer shot with the sun rising over the conservatory. It was the first time since I retired I had to be anywhere except the hospital first thing in the morning.

Introductory remarks and introductions were held in the carriage house side.

The director of the Art Center just happened to be standing right behind me and gave a few welcoming remarks.

The actual workshop was held in the conservatory.  During the presentation, the art center director was spotlit by a sunbeam from the skylight.  I wonder if he was aware of it?

The exercise used a history/sociology lesson about Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Union. A painting by Octavio Ocampo was used to stimulate discussion and the small-group, active-learning, arts-integrating method was to create a tableau vivant with a six or seven word script to interpret his life and accomplishments. The instructor's caveat to think about how you were going to hold a pose for a minute or two sounded like it would be useful for working with pinhole tomorrow afternoon.

Started out on chairs, but with a room full of twenty-somethings, when the active-learning group work started, there was a lot of sitting on the floor.

The morning ended with lunch.

The next afternoon was my turn. No darkroom at the Paine, so we were two blocks down Elmwood Ave. in the Arts & Communication Building at the University.

Tried to have everything ready when they arrived.

It was kind of odd to be introduced as someone who for a long time has had pinhole photography as a hobby. That's what I get for my lack of ambition and conceptual discipline.

Drilling the pinholes and installing them on the cameras.

I spent most of the afternoon in the darkroom and looking at the pictures as positive images on a document camera and discussing them with the participants.  With 23 of them, it felt like I hardly got to work with them at all. When I did get out side, there was only this one group nearby to capture with the Populist.

I got him to get closer.

We had looked through the cameras before installing pinholes to get an idea of the angle of view and had gun site indicators on the camera to determine what was in the frame.  Despite the cameras being about the angle of view of the cell phone cameras they use all the time, when setting up a picture without a viewfinder, most of them seemed to revert to framing the picture about the way how they thought they would frame it with the normal perspective of their eyes instead of getting as close as they needed to with these wide angle cameras. Pre-visualizing the pictures with a wide angle pinhole camera seems to be something that you have to learn to do (...the zen of pinhole?).  I wish I had another day with them.  You can only accomplish so much in a one-day workshop.

It was a brilliant, bright sunny day. I was distressed that there were so many issues with light leaks that had to be fixed.  I think I'm going to get a tattoo that says "The sun is a vengeful benefactor" Anyway, the only picture I took with the workshop materials, in order to test the light-tightness of a camera, was this self-portrait, posed so I could hold it for a minute or two.

All the color with the Populist, .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame.

The black and white with a .5mm pinhole 5 inches from a 4x5 frame.

Workshop test

I get to do a workshop for public school teachers this summer.  Most of the workshops I've done were with elementary and middle school kids.  I've done two with adults.  One was part of a graduate course and a few of the students who were high school science teachers were really mad because I hadn't been told to assign them a grade and I didn't have any criterion for doing that.  The other was a "Faculty College" that was offered during off-semester times for general professional and sometimes just personal development of the faculty and staff.  The group that day was small and really into it, but the weather was extremely dark overcast and rain - over 10 minute exposures.  They got in a few shots anyway. (Later edit: I forgot about two sections of Art Education Students I worked with)

The one this summer is part of a program called Arts Core that emphasizes integration of art objectives anywhere in the curriculum so the teachers could be from K-12 and in any discipline. Should be interesting. I've got a four hour block in the middle of a three day event, which is actually the beginning of a year long experience that includes two more sessions in the fall and spring. They want to include "storytelling" in the workshop.  I can dig that.

The last workshop of any kind I did was in 2006.

Yesterday, I went over to the Art Department darkroom at the University we'll be using  (the last one on campus) which I hadn't seen for ten years. It turned out to be much as I remembered it.  I also had a 10 year old box of about 80 sheets of paper that I wanted to find out if it was fogged or not.  Turned out OK - I couldn't tell the difference between a sheet I developed and one I threw directly into the fixer.

So I made a few test exposures with my old f130 two and a half inch foamcore camera, again, something I haven't done for ten years.

It was a bright sunny day.  I started with a 20 second exposure. I didn't measure it with anything and I just counted so it might have been a little long.

A little overexposed, so I cut the second back to 12 seconds.

Still a little denser than I would like, but that curve in the upper left had corner is kind fun.

When I reloaded and came out for the next one, a bit of haze had come over the sun, so I did 9 seconds.

Just right!

University Club

U-Club is a campus social group which meets monthly during the school year for drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and general commiserating and conspiring.

I only take photographs there occasionally, because there's the perpetual pinhole problem of not much of a place to put a tabletop tripod (much less a regular tripod) where it won't get bumped by the milling crowd, and I have an odd reluctance to be noticed doing it.

Occasionally both objections are manageable, and I take a few exposures.

The most recent meeting, I was one of the earlier arrivals and got a seat on a couch with the only coffee table in the room right in front of me.

I sat down next to Grace, a former big city journalist who followed her mathematician spouse to the outlands.  By sheer force of will, Grace developed a class which involves one big all-class project which my department would help stroke into print, web and video productions.  The University loves her because she get's at least half a page in the local newspaper and a few minutes on the Green Bay TV news every time she puts one of these out. (Grace would kill me if I didn't link to her latest project). Here's she's trying to corral Bill, a chemistry professor, into giving a presentation in one of her live happenings.  I'm trying to figure out how to explain to Bill that his head has been replaced by the lamp shade behind him. I got it – it's symbolizing how bright scientists are.  Yea, that's it.  Bill is also heavily involved in the Faculty Senate so possibly it represents the transparency of University governance.

When I went into the other room I ran into Allison, the University's new photography teacher, whom I'd already met last fall.  While we chatted about teaching photography and of course, me plugging pinhole, with the dining room table right in front of us, it seemed obvious to take a picture.  I didn't get a chance to ask Alison about her own work so I googled her and she's doing this fantastic project about "a place between reality and play", in which she appears in all the photographs.  I can relate to self-portraiture.  Allison has a really consistent conceptual framework and looks like very disciplined preparation.  I do self-portraiture because it's convenient.

Standing next to us were Jennifer, chair of the Chemistry Department, and Mary Ann, a faculty spouse who shepherds foreign exchange students, looking quite saintly haloed by the wall sconce with the camera looking up at her.  I wish I could say this was my idea, but it's often said that half the fun of pinhole photography is finding out what actually came through the pinhole. During the previous exposure, which took about 5 minutes,  Mary Ann mentioned that she had never been photographed with a pinhole camera.  It would be impolite to ignore a direct invitation like that. I warned her that sometimes odd things happen in pinhole portraiture.  The overexposed light coming through the hair on the back of her head somewhat modified her coiffure and reinforced the notion that she was glowing.  The overall composition of this picture was also a pleasant surprise, and brings out my latent didactic photo teacher.  Please discuss leading lines, framing, the rule of thirds and a high contrast center of interest.

All with the Populist.  .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame.