January Smorgasbord

I'm preparing for three upcoming workshops, which also includes learning what a new parts-cutting machine can do. (Most of what I wanted, so far). Combined with January gloom, taking photographs gets snuck in only occasionally.

One of my basement band-mates saw this at a holiday sale and thought I'd like a pick holder to match my amplifier. I hastily moved it to the sofa when a sunbeam popped up. These Fender rubber grips are the best accessibility device for the geriatric condition of my right thumb and allow me to use heavy picks (Rhythm Guitar, ya know). 

Last fall, I bought a set of strings for the Telecaster and accidentally got a heavy set of strings for tuning down two steps. I thought that might be cool on the Warlock. It was interesting but not all that different, and it made it confusing to play with other people, even if I am only transposing three chords. It did allow me to perform a couple of songs that were a little high for my limited vocal range without changing how they're played. Pretty showy for an elderly codger to show up for an open mic with this guitar. (It was just before Halloween.) I recently had those strings tuned back up to E. (It's a Floyd Rose bridge.)  The more percussive sound with the taut strings works for my enthusiastic strumming. Watch out in Oshkosh and Hortonville!

Responding to another sudden appearance of a sunbeam which fell on the jam jars, apparently bumping the camera or double exposing something in the process.

Same surprise sunbeam, another day, with a new cookie recipe without so much pinholiness.

Sarah is allergic to lily pollen, but the blossoms are OK if the dark anthers, which contain the pollen, are removed right away. That gave this one a different look.

Hiding in the Hydroxyl Nebula, the Millennium Falcon and an X-Wing orbit the metallic moon Jinglebell, avoiding the shiny stars in the Chocolate Cluster.

Photo Opp had an event for the closing of their annual juried show, and added a cook-off to the celebration. The line of participating crockpots is spread along the wall beneath the artworks. After conversing with Mike Berman for 20 minutes, who was sitting on the upholstered bench with his new reflective grey beard, I set up the camera next to me while he watched. As soon as I opened the shutter, he got up to talk to Graham Watashka over on the right side of the image.

Half the board of Photo Opp trying out the cuisine. My recollection is that they, too, had left in the middle of the exposure, but it appears they stayed for most of it. I don't remember doing anything to create those squiggly highlights above the table.

One offering at the end of the table was a dip with assorted media to scoop it with in bowls, which might stay put for the whole exposure. The relish in the corner got dished with a spoon, but not moved.

They've now completed the darkroom. I have plans to do an analog-only workshop with 4x5 paper as soon as I drill the 40 pinholes for enough Pinhole Lab Cameras. Repetitive, thick parts like pinhole mounts, film holders, and shutters, which are a pain with a craft knife, are going to be easy and very accurate with the new cutting machine.

Somewhat ironically for this blog, tables full of lenses, which I have volunteered to help catalog. There are several exotic telephotos with M42 screw mounts that fit my Mamiya 1000DTL, including a 400mm telephoto. The biggest temptation to use a lens since I bought a Beauty of a rangefinder here last summer.  n.b. M42 adapters for mirrorless digital cameras are really cheap if you can handle focusing and setting exposure manually.

The EyePA has .23mm hand-drilled pinholes 30mm from a 6x6cm frame, on the axis and 11mm above it. The film is Kentmere 400 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

Yule Fortnight

With the midday sun as low as it gets in the sky, one of our local antifascist groups, Peaceful Patriots, organized an appearance in downtown Oshkosh.

A holiday theme at this time of year.

A fuzzy headed liberal.

A volunteer warned me about the dangers of being doxxed, so I was careful to ask everyone's permission. Most were happy to pose.

This protester was conversing with a guy with a silver snare drum, his head enclosed in a heavy knit hat, and his face obscured by a scarf and sunglasses. He didn't want to be photographed and stepped away. She cheerfully posed alone. We had a conversation about how odd it was to have to protest extrajudicial killing and piracy on the high seas. Not to mention invading a sovereign country to profit from oil again.

Our annual lefse production run. Wouldn't be Yule without it, although there are Norse culinary traditions we happily have let lapse.

The weather has been very overcast and gloomy, so you take your sunbeams where you get them.

For the spooky section of the tree.

Santa puts on more traditional ornaments.

New Year's Eve dinner.

The living room by available light on New Year's Day.

While that was exposing, I noticed the window light reflecting off the dish of Gelt and truffle stocking stuffers. I had a curious, conflicted reaction to the scene. Corona Beer's brand seems to have survived its brush with horror. Maybe my Populist camera can withstand the current evil manifestation of its namesake idea. Someday, gold may also regain its symbolism of celebration.

Merry Perihelion!

The Diversity 30 has hand-drilled .23mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Kodak Gold 200 developed in a Cinestill Powder C-41 kit.

Small format, wide camera, short roll, long time.

In mid-July, in anticipation of upcoming events, I loaded the venerable PrePopulist with a "24 exposure" roll of film. I chose the camera with its 24x50mm format and the short roll of film so I wouldn't have to take so many pictures before I got to see them.

The first event in question was Photo Opp's Rummage Sale of donated gear. They kept what was needed for their educational mission, but the sale included a lot of usable stuff, roughly categorized on tables and in bins.

A group showing me their discoveries.

The display of lighting equipment. I got an umbrella and stand.

A badly composed image of a table of folders. Non-working cameras were $5 and working ones $15. I also got a pretty neat rangefinder and a professional tripod.

As a higher education audio-visual professional, 16mm film projectors have played a central role in my life. The most common fear of public speaking is obviously not a problem with college faculty, but operating one of these probably took its place for them in the 20th century. I learned to thread one in science class in 7th grade on a Bell & Howell 535 and got punished in art class in 8th grade for running the film in reverse. This one is an auto-loading 556. The lamps are still available for only $11. (Always buy a spare lamp.) Photo Opp has surely kept a projector for 16mm, but I bet it's a manual-loading Kodak Pageant.

Then I set the camera down on the shelf in the basement and knocked it over the back with at least two layers of bags and boxes on the floor in the way. In October, Andy came and helped recover a working space in the basement so I could get at the bottom of the shelves. Preparing for a workshop in Wausau, I organized my collection of raw materials, much of which had also fallen behind the shelf, and recovered the camera to record making Populists on the 1st of November.

After making cameras, we all went to lunch at The Mint, Wausau's oldest restaurant, here since the 19th century.

Sarah and I went to lunch at Fratello's one sunny day.  Looking into the bar while we waited to be seated.

The Appleton Dam just out the window. I found myself thinking how nice it was that we got seated in this warm dining room instead of the one the ducks were feasting in just below us.

The Truffle Pig restaurant that I predicted on this blog has opened, and we have visited several times. It's very nice. Finally, more emphasis on the experience and not just a giant plate of food.

In the midst of all the character-building events of the year, the reviled Jenn-Air refrigerator decided to add refrigeration to the list of things it's no longer capable of. Many thanks to the FedEx delivery driver who carried the dorm refrigerator over the rubble to get us through for a month until someone could manage with the full-size model when the street was done, with no through-the-door anything and no handles to come loose.

I checked out the massive Irving Penn Centennial from the library. His signature style was working against a studio background wherever he went, but just using available north light. When he was among the top commercial photographers in the world, he used to go into the darkroom and hand-coat big sheets of platinum paper for his personal prints. My list of influences is long and constantly changing, but Penn is always on it. This is an uncomfortable segue. Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, who sent me down this pinholic rabbit hole and about the only photographer who influenced me that I have actually met, has just died.

Because of a few shutter opening and clicker errors, and maybe because I was eager to get it done when it seemed a little hard to wind, there was a particularly low yield from this already short roll of film. About time, though.

The PrePopulist has a .15mm Gilder electron microscope aperture 24mm from a 24x50mm frame. The film is Kodak 400 UltraMax developed in Cinestill's C41 Powder Kit.

C'est fin

Several weeks after the end of the destruction-and-burying-things phase of the Central Street project, reconstruction finally began.

This gigantic machine showed up at the end of the block.

They prepare and pave half the road at a time, guided by an orange string. There was a supply of this bent green rebar every 10 meters or so.

The completed east side.

Our magnolia was the subject of some disagreement between the people who run that giant machine and the city, which wanted to save the mature flowering tree, which is on the approved list for planting next to the street. When they were stretching that orange string on our side, someone painted an orange X on the trunk and wrote "In the way" with an arrow pointing to it in the dirt next to it. This led to a discussion in which the city engineer eventually clarified who made these decisions. The giant machine was diverted around the tree. Maybe the neighbors will replant with some of these.

We imagined this as a reflecting pool for the magnolia for a while.

 

A giant excavator left mid-stroke grading the surface

Eventually, they came back and built forms and poured our bit of the street.

Drilling a hole with a high-pressure water hose to get at something they buried earlier this summer.

All ready for sidewalks and driveways.

Pouring our driveway and the sidewalk. A surprisingly manual process compared to the machine-sculpted street and curb, involving shovels, rakes, long boards dragged across it to level the surface, and the curved edge of the apron sculpted by hand with a trowel.

During all this, the Mustangs were exiled to the street a half block away. The first few days, everybody adhered to the alternate side parking rule, but soon we all just had our parking spots. Could be worse than having two Mustangs in front of your house.

The finished product - almost. A private contractor needs to come and redo the pipes from the city lines to our house, probably in the spring. That goes under the sidewalk and the porch, so we get a neat Goth path in asphalt, which is cheaper to install and remove than concrete. The magnolia finally has what's left of its roots reburied. It's obviously been stressed, including one of its branches being torn off by an excavator. There's been a frost, the remaining leaves are gone, but it's full of flower buds. Many thanks to Glody Onya, the Project Manager, and Travis Derks, Landscape Operations Manager, for preserving our tree. 

Morton has two .23mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film was Kodak Gold developed in Cinestill's Powder C41 kit.

Workshop in Wausau

 

Last Saturday at the Center for Visual Arts in Wausau, I introduced Mara, Kristin and Jean, three enthusiastic, cheerful artists, to the practice of pinhole as well as to photography as a medium in general. All were practicing artists in other media, but didn't consider themselves photographers or had any prior photography instruction. 

Everyone made an attractive camera with particularly smooth shutters and film advance, and all drilled a nice round pinhole within a few hundredths of a millimeter from the optimal on the first or second try. 

They already grasped the idea of previsualizing a picture and understood my instruction to put the camera where they needed to frame that composition, using the viewfinder beads to determine the edges of the frame. It's probably not much different than deciding where to put an easel to sketch a scene. The 90-degree wide-angle didn't seem to be a problem. I saw several frame-filling close-ups that had to be very close to the camera. They all got 12 accurate exposures by referring to a table of lighting conditions. To be fair, it was uniformly cloudy, so the exposure was four seconds almost everywhere.

None of them had any experience with analogue photography, other than dropping off film from a point-and-shoot to get processed. Unrolling the film off the developing reels was a very dramatic experience with oohs and aahs.

They did an extraordinarily good job. Most of their images I wouldn't be surprised to see on a gallery wall, and that's before editing. Jean made a blog post with a few of her photographs. Later edit: In her first picture, I'm in it, taking my first picture.

The museum sits on one corner of City Square, a few blocks above the Wisconsin River. Mara and Kristin went off down the valley (very cool skies over the river), and Jean and I stayed around the square.

My camera is the Original Premi in the lower right corner above. I used to avoid white and lighter colored packaging because its opacity can be suspect, but now with the triple-layer shutters covering the entire front and back, it hardly matters.

Next door to the Museum is the Grand Theater. The last gasp of Neo-Classicism, with the square columns mere decorations on the exterior, the bases oddly unmatched.

The south side of the square is dominated by a large bandshell supported by these very functional columns.

Looks like plenty of electricity for the band to plug their amps into.

There was an emergency call to a person who had fainted on a park bench. I took the opportunity to photograph the shiny fire truck that came along with them. 

The Palladian is a condo building with very little, if any, Palladian architectural elements.

Third Street is lined with clusters of trees that were in autumnal yellows in front of the brick. There seemed to be an SUV almost everywhere I wanted to put my tripod to feature one, but maybe a little off-center is better composition.

Symmetrical decorative ironwork to protect both tree and pedestrian.

An asymmetrical Deco entrance.

When we got back near the museum, there were no cars parked in front of the theater. The marquee of the Grand changes after just about the length of the exposure.

The back stairwell to go with the photo of the front one I did this summer.

All three participants made one deliberate double exposure. Mine was not deliberate, but makes a great segue. One of our living room chairs in front of the building out the museum window, with tiny concrete patio furniture on the floor next to it; the background faded by the already exposed sky.

The spooky state of the mantle, from 9:14 until 9:15.

The most serious problem that occurred is that I wasted fifteen minutes when I forgot to turn on the LED light pad when we were capturing the positives. The iPad tried really hard, but I couldn't figure out why it had trouble focusing (lenses!), and the files were so low contrast and noisy.

One thing that keeps occurring to me while doing this: If you have been thinking you'd like a pinhole camera that's reliable, lightweight, rugged and easy to use, build one of these. It's easy. They're a joy to use.

The Original Premi has a .23mm pinhole 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Kentmere 400 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.