The evidence

In order to experience using a tripod, you have to shoot some film. Here's some of the data for my tripodology study.

Occasionally my bike rides take me on the Wiowash trail next to Highway 41 on the causeway over the Fox River and Lake Butte des Morte. In the center where it opens into a bridge, there are trails that lead down to the water's edge. I'd been down the one on the north side but until now had never gone down the one on the south. I discovered that it goes under the highway and over to the other side.

There was a boat full of fishermen just off shore sitting relatively still. I started with the PinRui flexible tripod wrapped around my bicycle handlebars.

Turning around, the view of the bridge itself.

Between 1980 and 2011, for state projects that are primarily for access by the public, there was a Wisconsin law which mandated that a small percentage of the construction budget be used to commission art work. Apparently they felt people accessing the bridge would be going by boat. Although the bridge has some decorative railings on top, I never knew these graphics were down here.

Walgreen's has decorative plantings around their parking lot. I had walked over so no handlbars to wrap the tripod around and nothing else handy. I had to put it down on the ground to capture this burning bush.

Another autumn show-off, again from about seven inches off the ground.

I switched to the ProMaster when I went out to rake leaves. Here I'm holding it against the trunk of our large pine.

Still held up against the pine tree but looking the other way up Central St. I thought I felt the camera slip around so I tried three exposures to hold it still. They all look about the same. This is the last one that I thought wasn't moving. The slight movement does give it a little extra pinholiness.

A view with the tripod on the ground, so no camera movement here.

An unsuccessful attempt at Footography.

I went on a bike ride with the Amazon. Can't wrap this one around my handlbars. Here it's held up against an oak tree.

Held up against a fence at the Yacht Club.

This happened to be on Halloween. It may look like the tripod is on the floor but it's held up against a column on the porch to get it just a little higher in order to look this guy right in the eye. The fluting provides some nice bracing to keep the hard plastic feet from sliding around.

This summer the arbor was covered with morning glory vines, although few morning glory blossoms. The first frost gave it a bit more of a Halloween appearance. The tripod is sitting on the gazing ball.

It is possible to hold the camera motionless held against a smooth wall but it takes some concentration.

I suppose if it were listed in a cooking supply catalog it would be called a counter top tripod.

It doesn't make any difference what the tripod is if you bump the subject during the exposure.

All with the Populist. .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame on Kodak Gold 200.

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.

From f295: My second pinhole bike ride and my last post.

f295 was an international discussion forum begun and administered by Tom Persinger. Originally just about pinhole photography, it expanded into all kinds of alternative methods. It was active from 2004 until 2015 but it remains on-line. Recently it disappeared from the web for a few days, and that prompted me to decide to reprise some of my favorites here at Pinholica, for backup if no other reason. 

Although I'd been carrying around The Populist for eight years, I didn't use it riding around on my bike until I retired.  This was the second ride where I deliberately set out to take photographs, roughly in the same area as the first movement of An Etude for Three Pinhole Cameras. It concludes with one of my favorite jokes.

About a month later, new photographs could no longer be uploaded to f295, so I started this blog. 

It was posted under the title "A bike ride to Asylum Point" on September 24, 2015.

I had such a good time with my bike ride I thought I'd do it again. This time I'm going out northeast to Asylum Point.

Through Fairacres again, this time to the right through the tidy little townhouse collection on the east side.

You have to go through the Northeast Industrial Park, passing one of three Oshkosh water towers. This is probably where my water comes from. Anybody else remember that Kodak booklet that recommended framing scenes with tree branches?

When I was a kid in South Bend, Studebaker, Bendix and Singer Sewing Machines were huge multistory brown monsters in the middle of the city that came right up to the sidewalk. Now even some pretty heavy industry has a huge lawn and a little office complex fronting a massive flat building surrounded by cornfields on the outskirts of town. It's not as photogenic as Aramco Steel, but it's probably a lot easier to live around. 

Now we're really out in the country. In flat Winnebago county, that often means you're looking at a wall of corn.

Here's why it's called Asylum Point, the gigantic Winnebago Mental Health Institute, which also houses the state facility for the criminally insane. It's been here since 1871. Sarah's aunt was here briefly during World War II for something that at the time would have been described as a nervous breakdown.

Asylum Point itself ends with a little island you have to cross this bridge to get to.

A prime feature is the lighthouse. It was built by the Works Progress Administration during the depression, but the the Department of Transportation decided it was unnecessary for navigation, and it's never been lit.

Looking ten miles directly east across Lake Winnebago toward the much hillier Calumet County.

At the northern end of the park is a pathway that leads into the woods.

At the end of it is the Picnic Point Boy Scouts' camp. I was here once when Andy was a kid for the Klondike Derby. In addition to sub-zero (F) temperatures, there's always a stiff wind off Lake Winnebago. Andy's face got slightly frost bitten and we spent much of the event in first aid.

It's pretty isolated and I thought I was the only person around, but as I looked for scenes of the lake, I ran into this fisherman who consented to adding interest to the foreground.

Going out the access road, you come across the Asylum Cemetery, in use from 1872 to 1973. For me cemeteries are usually just quiet parks, but this one out in the middle of the woods sort of gets to me.

A mile or so north I ran across this other historic graveyard that must have been way out in the middle of the section when it was active.

I was going past it to go through the fairgrounds, for those of you who winced nostalgically a little bit when I said Fairacres by my house used to be the county fairgrounds. I always thought it was the ugliest fairgrounds in the state so I didn't mind when they moved it out here. This is the horse barn, which they were cleaning when I took this photograph. Good thing I hadn't brought my Smell-o-vision adapter. I don't know if it counts as dairy air when it's horses, but you get the idea. This has to be the shittiest photo I've ever posted.

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