The Populist: variations sans pattern

What makes the Populist "a camera that anyone can make" is probably the printed pattern, but the basis of the design is the front box with chambers on the side for the film reels, and the back which slides over the front, which makes for a nice, light-tight enclosure.

I've made a couple variations just by measuring the parts out without using a printed pattern. 

I mentioned in the post about the Glenmorangie Evil Cube that Sarah had given me a bottle of scotch for Christmas with the sentiment that she chose it because it looked the most like you could make a pinhole camera out of the box.

Scotch does generally come in some pretty sturdy boxes, and in this case, I really just used it as cardboard with a few folds already in the right place, and of course, I wanted the design on the box to look like it was made for the camera.

The width of a box of Scotch is just greater than the size of a 120 reel, so I added some foamcore spacers to get it right. The other dimension can be adjusted, but there really wasn't enough material to make a 6x9 and keep the pinhole where I wanted it on the design, and I think I've mentioned my inner cheapskate freaking out about only getting 8 pictures out of a role of 120 film, so it's 6x6cm.

The distance to the pinhole was again determined by how much cardboard I had while keeping the design of the box in place, which turned out to be 45mm. I used a .3mm Gilder electron microscope aperture, which is about the ideal size according to Mr. Pinhole.

I used it to photograph a gift I gave to Sarah that Christmas. 

And of me rocking out in the basement.

A couple years later I got it out again to make Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day special, and submitted another variation on one of my favorite themes.

Last summer as part of my renewed interest in larger formats, I again loaded it up and set out to start a series on historic places in Oshkosh.  Here's Oaks Candy, established in 1884.  I had to buy a bunch of candy to justify taking up space in their store for this shot, but that's the price you pay for art.

I've always been fascinated with portrait painting.  The poses required for sketching from life seem like something that could accommodate pinhole exposure times.  A few years ago, my instructional media department inherited a photographic studio very near my office when the Publications department got one built near their main offices in another building.  In my hopes for taking advantage of this, I built this 4.5 x 6 cm camera with a vertical format as it was mounted on the tripod which is a typical format for a portrait with a 6 cm distance to the pinhole yielding a relatively "normal" perspective to reproduce what a painter would be seeing with their eyes, although still a little wide for what we might consider for lens portraiture.

I never did get the guts to ask anyone to pose for me in the studio, except for that most convenient and cooperative model.

I did use it for a bit in the garden.

With both of these cameras I had problems with the film jamming up about the 9th or 10th frame.  I thought it was because the film reels got out of parallel and bound up, but I've had the film smoothly go through in both at other times, and I never had a problem with the 120 Populist or the Stereo 120 Populist.  I think it might have something to do with not advancing the film far enough on the take-up reel before I put it in the camera.  On subsequent 120 cameras, I've been putting a second winder and some little axle in the bottom of the reel to make sure they remain parallel.

Sometimes problems lead to serendipity though.  When I was working on the Portrait camera I was dealing with the worst personnel conflict of my career and took this face-palm shot just as I had read an email from one of the participants right after I got home from work. (Career advancement tip: Don't email the boss about problems right after work) The camera was in the process of jamming and after a series of aggressive twists just barely getting it to advance, I think it must have squeezed the film so hard it left these red marks on the image which I think enhanced the impression of frustration in the picture. I used it as my Facebook profile picture for about a year.

The Populist: Variations with the standard pattern

The basic plan of the Populist is pretty easy to modify to different pinhole to film distances by just making the sides longer (Henry Longbow in Texas made one with the pinhole inset into the camera body to make it shorter) and with a bit bigger diagram and a minor change or two, for 120 film. There's no reason you couldn't make a 16mm version if you had some of that laying around that was still light sensitive.

The Stereo Populist

The first variation I made was a stereo camera pretty early in the process. A Japanese company was marketing a plastic snap-together stereo camera that was getting a lot of posts on Flickr and other internet discussion sites, so I sat down one afternoon, and made a version of the Populist. I just cut off the film chamber ends of the diagrams, supply on one side and take-up on the other, glued them side by side on one piece of cardboard, and then completed it pretty much like any other one-and-a-half Populists.

One thing I learned with this camera that has nothing to do with stereo was that brown cardboard cartons, like a lot of beverage twelve packs are made of are not as opaque as cereal boxes that are grey, so it got covered with tape pretty fast.

I had a lot of fun with it. Here are my two favorites. If you can't get stereo to work with crossed-eyes setup, try this link 

In 2013 I got a bug in my ear about a traveling camera project such as I had participated in a couple times earlier in the century. I took this camera and another one that Earl Johnson had acquired as a contribution premium to f295, tarted them up with the latest Populist improvements, packaged them in nice foam-lined presentation boxes (originally containing Crabtree & Evelyn soap) and sent them off to six participants including one in Ireland, one in England and one on Curacao, a Caribbean island.

Only three out of the six ever took photographs with it, one of the cameras was lost in the mail on it's way back to me and the other is just missing in action. The three that did shoot some film with it made some interesting photographs, with the coolest (but not the greatest stereo effect), being this image by Evan Hughes of the oriel window at Lacock Abbey that appears in Talbot's first camera negative.

The Panoramic Populist

A couple years later, a participant on f295 posted about a beautifully crafted camera he had made out of a wooden dominoes' box, which if you think about how those are packaged, was a long narrow rectangle. He made a 35mm camera out of it just using the dimensions of the box to determine the image format (that sounds familiar) which turned out to be 96mm, two and two thirds the width of a normal 35mm camera. Hmmm...could you do that with the Populist?

This time I just glued two patterns side by side with only one film chamber cut off (36+36+24=96). Instead of the extremely long internal divider, I made the film chambers out of separate little boxes, and this time I had the sense to put internal stops on the shutter to keep it from pulling out. Otherwise, follow the master recipe.

96mm is extremely wide for 24mm from the pinhole. Mr. Pinhole says the camera covers 127 degrees, but the usable image area is only 46mm wide at that distance.

But if you find a subject where it's dark in the middle and bright out at the edges, you can fill the whole format.

Although most of the time, it would drop off to black only covering about 72mm.

The 120 Populist

I occasionally got feedback complimenting me for bringing pinhole to the people, and they personally might try it if there was a 120 version, ya know, more appropriate for pinhole. So about the same time I made the stereo version, I made one.  The diagram is at this link.

Other than just enlarging things, the only differences are that the end of the winder has to be whittled to fit into the slot in a 120 film reel, it has a window and a shutter for the film counter, and I just picked the 60mm pinhole to film distance rather than just use the diameter of the 120 film reel (although I have seen people make cameras that wide angle).

It has a couple little enhancements.

It looks like I got a little bit of rubylith to cover the counter window, although that's completely unnecessary if you're half-way careful about only opening the counter shutter out of direct sunlight. 

I placed a small cylinder around the winder hole
because I was concerned about light-tightness and to add a little more friction to keep the winder from falling out.

I also added a stop to the shutter so it didn't pull right out.

For a kind of large piece of thin cardboard, it's quite rigid.  

I only shot two rolls at the most to make sure everything works.  Using larger film, of course,  does have aesthetic benefits which I didn't appreciate at the time, but for a 6x9cm format it's 3 times more costly to operate and I just didn't get the additional thrill out of it. I was having too much fun with the standard Populist. (I am currently playing with 120 film again)

One funny thing.  This camera is made out of a Kellog's Corn Flakes box which is probably the only one of those I've ever bought.

The Stereo 120

I mentioned that I've been playing with 120 occasionally and was getting intrigued by the quality of the images with the larger format and while the Stereo Populist was off on it's voyage,  I decided to build a stereo version of the 120. I was also thinking that stereograms as we're used to seeing them, are done on 6x6cm negatives.  

Again, it's a simple matter of cutting the ends off two regular patterns and gluing them together to create side by side chambers. Also by this time, I just included all the little improvements right from the start. Unlike the Stereo Populist which at 24mm is pretty wide for stereo, the 6cm distance to the pinhole was more in line with commercial 120 lensed stereo cameras which I found ranging from 45 to 75mm focal lengths. Here's the open back (with The Populist for scale) showing the two chambers. Looks like I added a little stiffening to that middle divider.

Again, these examples are set up for crossed-eyes viewing, so if you need to try again, here's that link to a lesson.

Normally I do a lot of burning and dodging to compensate for vignetting on the 24mm populist and blown out highlights on 35mm.  A revelation with these was that I used the scans directly as I got them from the camera store.

Next up are a few variations without using a printed pattern, and one sort of.

Mosquito Hill in December

It's not every year we get to Mosquito Hill in December. It doesn't take much snow for most of the paths to get tricky to impossible to traverse. There is cross country and snow shoeing, but we never seem to get properly set up for those.

This year, of course, has been unusually warm, so we made it up three times.

Winter is a bit of a challenge for the color photographer, but the moss tries to take up the slack.  I don't want to put anything in anybody's brain, but I can't help but see sort of a Disney cartoon face in the front of this rock.

To give you a sense of place, if I were also taking the greening of the hill switchback picture, the bottom of the tripod and my feet would be in the background of that image.

It was extremely foggy on the drive up and I was really looking forward to photographing at Mosquito Hill in it, but it cleared a bit as we approached New London. From the top of the hill, you could kind of see the northern limits of the fog.

In the early part of the month, we had several days below freezing.  The duckweed frozen into the oxbow was still green.

The fog made it a little dark, but it was so still you could get long enough exposures to do close ups of the seed pods in the meadow.

Two weeks later, it was all about the high water.  I can almost understand what's going on in Missouri. It's pretty typical of these lowlands to be under water for most of the spring, but in winter they're usually quite dry. The Wolf isn't flooding anything but a few riverside cabins, but it's plenty high to join with the oxbow and come up about as far in the lowland forest as I've ever seen it.

The bridges to the platforms were just barely out of the water.

These platforms are hinged to the bridge to rise and fall with the level of the oxbow.  Usually at this time of year they're going downhill with the platform sitting right on the bottom, which is often dry. This is about as high as they go.

It slopes up pretty quickly to the meadow, but there was water about two steps behind me.

Just after Christmas, we went up with Andy and Kristin. The switchback was even more colorless and without a source of fresh leaves, the paths of the hikers get traced by a slightly greyer line.

The sun shown for a bit, but we got there pretty late and the sun doesn't hang around that long on December 27. The extreme low angle really highlights the layers. It's tough to imagine this being the bottom of some PreCambrian sea, but then, that was long before North America was a specific continent.

The sun was setting while we were still coming down the hill, so that's going to be it for a while.

The next day about a foot of snow in high winds (it was officially declared a blizzard by the weather service) covered most of central and northern Wisconsin. Probably lots of interesting drifts if you can get to them.

Happy New Year and have a great Perihelion celebration tomorrow afternoon.

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

The Populist.

There comes a time when one has to face up to facts and accept that you're just hooked on something. When I started the Populist, I really didn't expect it to become my primary camera. Is it vain to really like your own photographs? I guess I've always felt that way about my photographs, but what was coming out of what was basically user experience testing was something new. It was like somebody else was taking the pictures. Especially color. But it wasn't just color. I hesitate to called it the impressionistic quality lest Alfred Stieglitz returns from the grave to mock me for it. I experimented for a while with 120, but just didn't get any extra charge out of it (I am re-exploring 120 now though), and I always just had a Populist in my pocket anyway. That was another thing that was a revelation. Having a camera in your pocket all the time.  While everyone else was experiencing the cell phone camera revolution, I was going through the same thing with a pinhole camera, although I fancy myself more as Brassaï, Kertész or Robert Frank. Out there among 'em with a Leica M2.

So after about a year, I decided to make one specifically for me. If you hear me referring to the Populist, it's usually this specific camera I'm talking about.

About the only difference from any other Populist is that it's made from some really cheap twenty-five year old black 4-ply Railroad Board, Dick Blick's economy brand sign boards. I've always liked black body cameras.

The first change was to put a sort of handle at the top of the shutter to make it easier to slide open.

Next was covering it in 3M #235 opaque black photographic tape. It's perfectly light-tight without it, but the card stock wears pretty fast, and doesn't do well with moisture. #235 gives it an almost leatherette feeling and although 3M states it's not for outdoor use, it's fairly waterproof – enough to survive running out of a summer shower.

The Populist is supposed to be reliable, but also easy enough to make that anyone can do it. Sometime you have to compromise a bit. The shutter is one spot that happened. There's no mechanism for preventing the slider from coming out when you open it. Friction is the the only thing that keeps it from falling out in general. After losing a couple in the field, I first tried to glue a little stop to the bottom of the slider, but it kept breaking off when I pulled it open.

The next change, which I thought of while walking in the woods one day, was to tape a shaped piece of wire (from a paper clip) to the slider with part of it outside the channel. The tape is wrapped up both sides of the slider so it's not as unreliable as it sounds.  It was a kind of tricky operation with exacto knives and tweezers, but it held up for quite a few years.

Occasionally it would come loose and get in the image, and have to be reinstalled. Sometime last year it came off and I lost it, and about a week later lost the slider itself. So I pulled off the original shutter and replaced it with a three-layer shutter with appropriate stops and handle.

The winder is also just held in by friction. With most film cassettes a 3/8" dowel is just slightly too big and you have to sand it a little to fit, but once jammed into the film reel it takes a bit of a pull to get it out.  But not always, and after a couple of years I lost a couple of those in less than a month.

So I made a winder minder from a little strip of beverage can aluminum with a slot encased in several layers of 3M #235 hinged on to the side of the camera which is then held down by the rubber band.

The bottom of the camera where it attaches to the tripod wore pretty quickly, so I added a layer of thicker aluminum from the pop top of a rice noodle can. That's more durable, but it tends to get distorted by the tripod head and next time I happen to have the camera empty at home, I'm going to replace the mount with a bit of wood inside and a T-nut held on by screws.

Viewfinder lines are included on the printed pattern, but they wear pretty quickly too. 3D objects to line up are much better to imagine a line in space (like a gun sight), so after replacing these lines about four times, I added some beads from pins I got from Sarah's sewing kit and covered the rest of the camera with tape.  There was also the exposure chart on the back that was no longer readable, which I didn't really need anymore that got covered too.  By the way I just guess at exposures. I only measure in the rarest of circumstances, although with my 120 experiments, I'm a lot more careful about that.

Most recently I cut a bike inner tube apart to make black rubber bands and spray painted the winder to complete the professional black body look.

It's no surprise I continued the themes from the Precursers and Prototypes.

I take pictures around the house.

In the garden...

With the cats, mostly Spenser...

I take pictures on the road.

At Sarah's family farm in western Wisconsin...

At venues famous...

And mundane

At Mosquito Hill.

And of course, self-portraits.

Hey! Wait!  I think I'm detecting another theme here!

OK, I have to fess up. I just read an article in the Guardian about Emmet Gowin, whose body of work includes many portraits of his wife.

This camera seems to be working out.  I'll think I'll keep using it.