Long John Pinhole

I've been carrying around the Moderately Telephoto Pinhole Camera in a Plain Brown Wrapper lately and came to think the camera wasn't completely opaque. It seemed to be fine in lower light situations around the house and on cloudy days, but out in the summer in bright light there seemed to be a few very dense, low-contrast negatives which were denser at the top and bottom of the negative than in the center as if there were photons sneaking through the back and over and under the opaque backing of the film.  If an image was done just after another so it wasn't in the bright light as long, the problem wasn't apparent. The inside of this camera was painted with black interior latex paint. It sure looks opaque, but it could pass some light in the bright sun or when the camera is out for a while even in cloudier situations.

So I put four heavy coats of black Krylon on the inside.

I recently wondered why long image forming objectives were called by the greek-derived word telephoto and short objectives were just referred to by their wide angle of view. It turns out that a telephoto lens is one with a special group of lenses that makes the overall device physically shorter than it's nominal focal length.  I can't use that term for a pinhole camera.

When painting it, I didn't mask off the outside and got quite of bit of paint spatter on it, so it's not in a Plain Brown Wrapper anymore. The punk look of the paint spatter is kind of cool.

So henceforth it shall be called Long John Pinhole!

There's a long tradition of long things being named John.  There's Long John Silver, the archetype of a pirate whom we all speak like in September. Long John Baldry was a favorite member of the British Blues movement.  The one piece union suit workers wore to deal with unheated factories and farms are Long Johns.  An elongated cuboid of fried pastry dough covered with icing is called a Long John.

So out around town in the sunlight to see how this worked out.

I've noticed the way the morning sun lit this back wall of The Light Of The World, Church Of The Living God, Pillar And Ground Of The Truth, on previous bike rides and returned several times to try to photograph it.  On separate occasions I encountered: three children playing in the front yard next door; an ugly giant SUV parked in front of it; garbage day; an occupied police car parked across the street; and the entire congregation restoring the inside. Finally, last week I got there and the light was perfect and the whole block was deserted.  With just Long John Pinhole along I needed to be out in the street a bit to get the wall parallel to the film.  I worked out the distance, leveled the camera and measured the exposure while still on the curb. After stepping out in the street and starting to adjust the camera pointing, a young women came out to let her dog pee, which appears in the lower left corner.  I explained that I was taking a photograph of the church.  She didn't reply.

While on the subject of churches and putting a tripod in the middle of the street, I've photographed this scene before, but with a 45mm camera.  With Long John, it's much safer on the curb and the compression of the narrow angle makes the proximity of Boots Saloon and St. Mary's school and church more pronounced.

The Howard is a newly restored event and performance venue.  It used to be the Eagles Club.  When Andy was in high school the Madrigal Dinners were held there, the first gig of his band Independent Rain took place in one of the smaller rooms in the front and for a few years the Winter Farmer's Market was held there with a full bar available. It's visible for a mile with the First National Bank looming behind it when you look straight down School Street. As you get closer and the relative distance to them changes, the bank recedes until it's just a detail in the background.

I had noticed the stairway and various balconies on the side and came back to photograph them in the morning light.  When I saw the ladder leaning on the wall, the spirit of William Henry Fox Talbot overcame me. I parked my bike near the street, set up tripod and camera, and then walked into the parking lot toward the building to frame the picture. Turning around after closing the shutter, there were three workers I hadn't noticed sitting on the back of a furniture truck taking their coffee break, watching me. Assuming they wondered about the cardboard box, I told them I was taking a photograph.  One replied that he guessed that, and wondered of what.  I said "Lines, shapes, shadows. A historic building. It tells a story."  He said he could understand that.

Practically across the street from Merrill School is Firehouse No. 8, most recently housing a public relations firm and two posh apartments, and now for sale. I wonder if the tower is part of one of the apartments.

There's an apocryphal story that at the meeting to incorporate the city in 1853, it was named after Chief Oshkosh because the recent settlers from the east, who called their settlement Athens north of the river and Brooklyn to the south, split the ballot and the otherwise minority earlier French and Indian residents voted for the name of the chief and won. This memorial to Chief Oshkosh was created in 1926, 68 years after his death. It's currently being restored.  There's some doubt that it's his body buried there and just about everything about whole memorial is erroneous.  He had a pretty challenging life. In 1827, The U.S. Government got impatient dealing with a loose conglomeration of Menominee leaders spread over half of Wisconsin and appointed him chief so he's the one who shows up on some pretty sketchy treaties.  He did keep his people from being relocated to Minnesota and on the reservation he negotiated for, set up a sustainable logging operation which is still running.  Later in life, he got pretty disillusioned and died in a bar fight. In an ironic twist, between the logging and casinos, the tribe has done quite well in the 21st century and purchased the naming rights to the new Menominee Nation Arena on the south side.

So did the extra layers of paint fix the problem with my negatives? I'm not sure. The dense areas on the bottom are gone, but there were a few negatives that had the issue at the top and overall fogging.  I now think what's going on is plain old fashioned overexposed skies being diffracted by the smaller than optimum pinhole.  I did the digital equivalent of burning through the density and using a number 4 filter and got some kind of dreamy looking scenes people often associate with pinhole.

I wanted to show both sides of the north inlet to Miller's Bay but I missed and you can just barely see the tip of Ames Point on the left.

The south end of Miller's Bay is enclosed by Monkey Island, a settling pond for the city's water supply.  There's a second inlet between it and the park.

All with Long John Pinhole. .33mm pinholes - one on-axis with the film plane and one 12mm above the axis - 120mm from a 6x6cm frame on Ilford HP-5 developed in Rodinal 1:50.

Pinhole Lab Camera Accessories: A Tripod

June 2019. When my university retiree account disappeared with a new change in policy, the pictures I uploaded to this blog while logged into that account disappeared. I'm working on fixing that but it's going to be at least a summer long project. 

Sometimes you get involved in a project, and because it's interesting and maybe for reasons that could either be described as obsessive-compulsive or religious, you go at it for a little while too long, and then find that maybe it's not worth it.

In workshops, I've always found it frustrating not to be able to give everybody a tripod so they could have freedom in placing and pointing the camera. I used to give out doubly bagged sandbags for participants to mush into a surface for the camera to sit on to level it or to point it up or down a little. With the Pinhole Lab Camera with it's rising and falling and left and right shift pinholes, my intention was to overcome that somewhat, but you know, you don't always have a perfectly level surface, and sometimes, you just want to point the camera directly at something and take advantage of that sweet rectilinearity of the pinhole when it's on axis with a flat piece of film.  There's also the issue, also addressed by the rising front of the Pinhole Lab Camera, of having the foreground fill half the frame.  If you're taking a portrait of someone across the table, having the camera six or so inches above it will help a lot with the composition, and the rising front can have a strange effect on shapes like heads near the top of the frame.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could make a tripod as easily as a pinhole camera?  How pinholy!  You could take advantage of the skills and materials used to build (and for me, design) the Pinhole Lab Camera.

Links:  Original Description    Construction    Feeding and Use    Link to Templates   Excusado

So I laid out the template so that it would fit on a tabloid sheet of paper. I tried to make the legs as long as I could on that paper size. I could make them bigger on multiple sheets, but you'd have to do the "glue A adjacent to A" several times and that increases the chance that something's going to get glued down out of alignment.

The forces on a tripod are greater than on a camera, and this model relies more on multiple layer lamination and folds and flaps to get the strength to adjust and hold the camera.  Maybe relies on them too much.  Some parts have multiple folds and it takes six binder clips or clothespins to clamp some of them.

I mentioned I worked for my dad in a plant making feed and fertilizer mixers in a previous post.  He not only managed the plant but he was the designer and engineer as well.  I make these templates on a computer with Illustrator and do repeated iterations to find out what works.  My dad would do it on a drawing table with trigonometry and the parts would fold and assemble together the first time. The feed chutes for those mixers had to fit into existing buildings and come in at some strange compound angles. He gave me the Chemical Rubber Company book of Standard Mathematical Tables for high school graduation.

So, what have I come up with?

It's a desktop tripod about 7 inches tall.  Not too big, but getting it that far off the surface it's sitting on gives you a lot of flexibility with composition.

The tilting head is held by a bolt and wingnut.  I just happened to have the little spring which allows a variable drag to the tilt so you don't have to constantly loosen and tighten it, you can just move it freely and it will stay in place.

It attaches to the camera with rubber bands. I hate to have a roll film camera without a tripod mount, but it's a pain with a single shot camera, especially one that's intended to be used in all sorts of orientations.  So the tripod has a little platform that can be attached with rubber bands. (Carry extras.)

It has a head that will tilt back and forth about 45 degrees.  It's a little steadier if that tilt is toward the single leg side of the tripod, but it's easy to switch from one side to the other if you're tilting the camera the other way.

If you need to tilt any higher, you can just change the orientation of the camera.

The legs are restrained from opening by a piece of butcher's twine (I do this in my kitchen) threaded through each leg through holes big enough to get it through and move, yet small enough to give a little resistance to hold the movement in place. I did this by glueing the end of the twine to a toothpick.

By adjusting where those legs are, you can make the camera level on a non-level surface.

It's admittedly a limited set of flexibilities, but it adds dramatically to the supports you can utilize and maintain a level camera. (You do want a level camera, right?)

It's very light and wouldn't be much use in a breeze.  Maybe if I could find those sandbags.

It's just a hair on the complicated side to make. The template is on-line if you can figure it out from these images.

The problem is that you can buy a table top tripod better than this for under $10.  You can get a 50 inch good-enough tripod from Target for $11 and a pretty decent 62 inch one from Freestyle for $30.  And you can get some real deals on spiffy vintage travel tripods for cheap on eBay. You'll need to make a platform to attach the camera with the rubber bands.

But if you're feeling pinholy some Sunday...

Camera maker manifesto

I shouldn't use the term manifesto, because that implies I'm trying to convince you of something, and I firmly believe you'll have more fun and be more creative if you just do what you feel like, but "statement of personal objectives and standards" doesn't make as snappy a title unless you have a Masters in Business Administration.

I think a lot about why I make cameras the way I do, and why others do it differently. Writing about something often makes you spin it around and look at it a little differently, and there's always the possibility that someone might comment and realign my perspective a little.

I make cameras that I want to use. For many years it was single-shot cameras, but my current goal is to have a roll film camera that's reliable to use, portable, and reloadable in the field. That of course means absolutely light proof. Never saw light leaks as charming.

Being made from paper, they're not as durable as wood with brass hardware, but they only weigh a few ounces and you could drop them off a ten story building and they would probably bounce without exposing the film. Some have been covered with opaque black photographic tape which makes them moderately waterproof, and I'm starting to experiment with clear finishes.

They're not made for sale. Since I promote the idea that anybody could make a camera as well and put directions how on the internet, it would be kind of weird to expect anyone to buy one. I think making your own camera is the ultimate sacrament of pinholiness. (Ya gotta do it at least once.) Recently the purpose of making some of them is to make sure those directions on the internet will yield a usable camera, and I do use them to make sure. I occasionally give them away.

I expect the images to be as good as those coming out of the best highly crafted cameras you can buy. This is determined by the shape of the exposure chamber and the pinhole. My experiment last winter demonstrated that anyone can make a pinhole, while not measurably better than expensive commercial pinholes, good enough that in most applications you can't tell the difference. (This post is about camera making, but, it's not the camera that takes the picture, it's the photographer.)

I started out drilling my own pinholes, but got hooked on Gilder electron microscope apertures for about a decade. Just in the last year or so, I've gotten a little superstitious about using anything but hand-drilled pinholes, and am actually having fun seeing how good I can get at it. Not about to say to an audience of pinholers that sharper is better, but it's fun to try.

You have to know roughly what's going to be in the picture.  My viewfinders are triangles on the top and sides of the camera which point to the edges of the image. Some 3 dimensional object like a bead does a better job than just a line drawn on a flat surface.

You need to know that the film is advancing, and how far.  With 120, a window with a shutter in the back does this, and for 35mm, counting sprocket holes with an audible clicker will tell you if you've advanced exactly one frame. I'm not as concerned about knowing how many frames I've exposed. Discovering when you get to the end of the roll seems to work with the zen of pinhole. I'm not fond of directions to rotate so many turns for each exposure.  If you space it right at the beginning, you get increasingly large gaps between frames toward the end.  If not you can overlap images. Wasting film is definitely not pinholey.

A tripod mount is essential.

I prefer a flat film plane, but that's an aesthetic, not an engineering decision.

My cameras are hand-made. The most complicated machine I use is a scissors. I don't have any woodworking or metalworking equipment or experience.

Glue, card stock, foam core, wooden dowels, paint, brass for the pinholes and the occasional cork from a whisky bottle are all the materials, often recycled from another purpose. I've been using the same bottle of Aleen's tacky glue for years. Much of the card stock is from packaging. I have bought a sheet of foam core and one each of black and white card stock in the past year (Tons of scrap pieces were available when I worked at the university). I bought a 100 x 6 inch roll of .002 inch brass shim stock on a grant in 1992. It's gone through the grant kits, through a dozen workshops and I've still got about a quarter of it left. It is about as good a material as you can get. These are pretty inexpensive materials. I was raised by a depression-era child of immigrants, so I guess I'm a little cheap.

I've promoted the idea that you could print a template so you didn't have to measure everything, glue it to an appropriate substrate, and just fold it and glue it together. You could argue that printing a template with a computer is high tech, but it's one that's available to everybody. I don't own a printer. I go to the library when I need templates.

I don't always use the printed templates. Sometimes I don't use a ruler to measure, for example using the actual film reel to measure parts that have to be that size. Lately, I've taken to cutting some parts without a steel rule, just following lines by hand.  My cameras look handmade.

It may seem that I don't care what my cameras look like, and that may have been true in the past, but I've been playing around with the idea lately.

I definitely don't care if it looks like a lensed camera. Just about every plan or kit for a paper camera either has parts or printing on them resembling parts of a lensed camera. Some of them with the most parts, which can be tricky to put together, include multiple-part, moving, functionless assemblages to look like viewfinders, shutter speed dials and for Pete's sake, focusing rings - on a pinhole camera!

Lately though I've gotten the idea to make them with the printing from the cardboard I'm using facing out and working the packaging design into the parts and trying to get the parts to line up with the original illustration. I've done it several times in the past, but now I'm working on the sixth camera in a row this year in that category. Blog posts about these coming up. Watch this space.

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 compact 120 6x9

In retrospect, 2007 and 2008 must have been a really schizophrenic years for me photographically. I was hot on the discovery of the Populist and color, but I was still pursuing some black and white.

I worked in the basement of a university library and my common path led right past the new books display and I immediately checked out any new photography books.  Sometime in the winter of 2006-2007, they got a biography of André Kertész. I was completely blown away, and slightly obsessively returned to black and white photography. Part of what grabbed me about Kertész' images was the high contrast, yet long grey scale in them. I had been slightly frustrated at times with the limited latitude of paper negatives and knew I had to go to film to get that quality. I bought some 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 inch film holders on ebay and built a simple foam core camera for them. (I even bought a new longer lens for my enlarger, but I never did use that). I lost enthusiasm for that format after I forgot to indicate that a holder was exposed a couple times, destroyed a few in the developer and accidentally exposed a half a box of film. Roll film seemed like the better solution for me. 6x9cm is identical in format to the little sheet film, and then you don't have to carry a bunch of film holders, and I was never likely to go full zone system and customize development for each image.

Like a lot of photographers of modest means, I suspect, I always lusted after professional medium format cameras. The 120 Populist was a pretty good solution, but at that time I wanted a little break from really wide angles, a longer version of the 120 Populist was getting to be a kind of funny sized box, and I wanted something that looked more like a Hasselblad. (I'm still a little on about this–see the Glenmorangie Evil Cube)

This is the second iteration of this camera I constructed.  My objective here was to make as compact a 6x9cm camera as possible with a "normal" perspective, and on the first one was a little too compact. Everything was too tight causing it to have film transport problems and it was really difficult to get open. It was destroyed when I tried to change film in the parking lot at the Farmers' Market and broke it in half.

This one is slightly larger, mainly because it's made of foam core and not matte board, and also has slightly more generous tolerances.

It's actually a pretty standard box camera arrangement. The camera front with the film transport and image plane is one piece which the back slides over to close the camera.

The film reels are toward the front of the camera. I think the two most common problems with 120 film transport is that the reels don't stay parallel to each other and eventually jam. My first solution was to limit the space they were in so they couldn't do this, but in the original version of this camera I destroyed in the parking lot, I went overboard and made them too tight and the film occasionally wouldn't turn at all. The solution was to loosen things up a bit and to put some slight axle in the bottom so it would stay parallel. I used some bits of bamboo skewers through the bottom of the camera, and to make it easier to load the film,  hinged a bit of the bottom which would be held closed when the back was in place.

The winders are 3/8 inch dowels with the end carved to insert into the slot on the film reel. Again, the winders are just held in by friction so I put bits of tape over the ends so they would be really tight. The dowels are inserted through some wine corks to give a bit more leverage to turn the film and two provide a bit of a light trap over the holes. I used two winders so that if the film got sticky, I could loosen the supply reel a bit, and then tighten the take-up side. With this camera that turned out to be unnecessary. The film advances smoothly with just the take-up winder, but it also gives a little security in case you accidentally wind the film a bit too far you can pull it back with the supply winder.

Inside the internal dividers again leave a pretty small slot for  the pinhole, but this time, it's mounted all the way inside. Looks like I didn't get it exactly centered in the slot, but the image isn't blocked and the whole 6x9cm opening gets illuminated.

Another addition based from looking at box cameras are some rollers at the corners made with bamboo skewers with a drinking straw around them. I'm not sure if that's really necessary, but the film transport on this camera is particularly smooth, so it's not hurting either.

It's 90mm from pinhole to film. I finally quit ignoring Lord Raleigh and it's got a .4 Gilder electron microscope aperture installed, therefore f225.

I did get at least one roll of film through the first iteration, and I think achieved some of the results the Kertész book inspired me to.

However, this was in the middle of my infatuation and eventual seduction by color, and only ran some color film through this version of the camera.

As mentioned in other posts, my inner cheapskate couldn't see much improvement over what I was getting out of the 35mm Populist and seemed to me was inhibiting my adventerousness that made the Populist such fun.  More recently with the leisure afforded by retirement, I've gotten intrigued again by the quality of the larger format and have recently exposed some film through this camera, which will be the subject of another post, and may have a few surprises.

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.