You knew I wasn't going to leave this alone.

The pattern of the light leaks from the Fashion Victim Camera was really odd. The top half of the image, which would have been at the bottom of the camera, was normally exposed. The bottom half, on top in the camera, was totally overexposed, divided by an unnaturally straight line for a light leak. If it had been unexposed, I could understand something getting in the way, but this was very strange for a light leak. Note the clear shape of a stray bit of tape blocking the film at the lower left of each frame. The answer finally occurred to me.

Many of my cameras have two pinholes, on the image axis, and a bit above it for limited rising front capability. Each pinhole is on a separate piece of brass. Because they're only 11mm apart, the brass has to be trimmed so one piece doesn't cover the pinhole on the other when they overlap. In this case, I got them trimmed so they just butted right up against each other, and didn't notice that it left a small slot between them when they were mounted.

On the inside, the opening is just a rectangle that accommodates both pinholes. Looks no different than the brasses overlapping, right?

What happened was that the gap between the brasses aligned with the top edge of the open area when the lower shutter was opened, creating what was essentially another aperture, though more of a slot and much bigger than the pinhole. When the shutter was opened, it created a very blurry and overexposed image in the upper half of the camera, obliterating the scene projected by the pinhole, and in the lower half, a practically unexposed image of the black back of the top shutter, leaving the pinhole image unaffected.

It had nothing to do with the translucent white card the camera was made out of, or the opacity of 3M #235.

The solution was simply another strip of opaque tape to cover that gap. On both sides, including a strip of cardstock for good measure.

Testing this hypothesis was relatively quick. I tried to recreate the images from the first roll.

Chanel products come in very good boxes. I'm loath to cut them up for cameras. Maybe someday I'll get into larger formats. They are also very handy and attractive for storage.

My new Cricut cutting machine came with a small supply of vinyl. Trying to think of an artistic use for it, I looked up the Japanese character for Kuro, the name I've given to my renovated Ventura guitar, and applied it as a headstock ornament -  matte black on the glossy finish.

A few of the new frets and the Black Winter pickups in a sunbeam with a mysterious, colorful reflection between them.

More of an action scene in that sunbeam. Pretty tricky to open the shutter and get your hand back on a chord for a five-second exposure.

My hair has been in a ponytail for over half my life. These are the best hair ties I've ever used. Anybody else notice this box is almost exactly as high as a 120 roll of film?

In workshops, where several people develop rolls of film that they've exposed in the same area as everyone else, there's often confusion as to whose negatives are whose. It occurred to me that using the first exposure for a selfie would solve that, in addition to being a chance to observe them exposing a frame and winding the film before they go off on their own. Last week, I led a workshop for high school students and used this camera to demonstrate how close to get, recreated here in the sunroom sunbeam.

The perfume shelf on top of the dresser in the bedroom.

We recently saw an episode of The Gilded Age in which the naive American heiress, the Duchess of Buckingham failed to signal her married status by not wearing a tiara. Tiaras have been substitutes for the halo of virtue and purity in religious art for centuries before that.

Body oil in a sunbeam.

Shrooms just after dawn.

Once again, the view from my place on the couch.

Simmering soup in the Le Creuset saucepan. 

Le Paquet Trente has two hand-drilled .21mm pinholes on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6 x 5.4cm frame. This was my first attempt to machine-cut the film holder. I forgot to make a few lines to score and had to do some manual convincing to get the folds right. A Hasselblad only makes a 5.6cm square image, but I want the whole 6x6. The film is Kodak Gold 200 developed in a C-41 kit mixed in August and over its recommended capacity with this roll.

Fashion Victim

 

In order to do a camera-making workshop, it takes me a couple days at least to make the internal parts. In order to reduce that time and get a little more accurate, I wished for a Cricut Explore cutter, which was granted to me. My primary motivation with this camera was to learn the interaction of Inkscape object-oriented graphics software and Cricut Design, which has some design functions but mainly operates the machine. This is not an insignificant learning curve. The first project was the parts of the Compact 30.

Receipts for orders from Chanel used to come in black, opaque envelopes. I've always made the mistake of placing one order for several things and they all come together in only one gift box. So, I have to give that to Sarah all at once (her birthday is in December). This year, since they have free shipping, I made three separate orders, all in individual fancy packaging  - with three of those envelopes. When they arrived, the paperwork was in white envelopes.

One objective was to see how accurately I could place something so it was where I wanted on the front of the camera. That turned out to be easy. There were a few stupid errors. On the back, I left the space for the shutter handle the same as it was on the front, which I patched.

The card is very translucent, but it occurred to me that with the thick black shutters covering the entire front and back, only the sides would have to be opaque. Being visible at the edge of the shutter would mimic the black corners of Chanel's packaging. When I cut the inside of the shutters, it was immediately apparent that there was a flaw in that plan with the empty slots in the channel. You might have noticed on the camera front, there is a light cut mark just where the shutter divides. I forgot to cut the double shutter in half, tried to do it from the back after it was assembled, and didn't quite miss going through the last layer. This illustration is of the shutters of the next camera. The front one I have brilliantly cut in half on the machine.

So the entire inside of the camera was covered with 3M #235 Opaque Photographic Tape - the good stuff.

It didn't work.

It's really odd that the light leak so preferentially covered half the negative and I can't see any obvious candidate. But I'm not going to try to fix it. It will have to be a lovely addition to my cabinet of rejects, and I'll take the lessons with me.

 

I also learned that with Mod Podge and a brush, it's easy to glue two identical copies of something together to thicken them or use two different materials, so everything gets a layer of opaque black paper where there used to be a template from now on.

Neville's Winter Diary

While scanning this roll of film, I listened to the Lensless and Lo-Fi Podcast episode "Pinhole & Music with Monika Braaksma." I hesitate to say it's a 36 exposure roll of 35mm lest it triggers host Andrew Bartram into a vision of the sulfurous underworld. Sitting in my pleasant sunroom, occasionally clicking Scan and Save while reading a magazine doesn't seem so horrible to me compared to being isolated in a cold, damp garage darkroom. I get his issue with the time it takes to edit those scans; it seems tedious, but it allows me to get a really close look at all my negatives and show them to everybody instead of keeping them safe and unseen in a file cabinet. Did I mention in my warm, pleasant sun room with dry hands? In response to your question, Andrew, I vote for you to print those pictures of the kneeling photographers.

There was a question of whether Monika considered her approach to photography was to document daily life. Andrew name-checked me as someone who treats a pinhole camera just like an iPhone to create a photographic diary. By "like an iPhone", he means like a regular (i.e., lensed) camera. It's more like a compulsion/curiosity to see what things around me look like when photographed like this, than it is to document my life. It does kind of work out that way. I regularly check my blog when we get into a discussion about where or when we did something. And it's definitely not like using a more common camera.

Discussing her cameras, co-host John Farnan and Andrew counseled that a deep relationship with a single camera was the best approach to mastering pinhole photography. I have five 35mm cameras and try to keep one in my pocket as often as possible. They are all nearly the same. I've been particularly neglectful of the small negatives in the past half year. 

Yule is always an opportunity for pictures, so in mid-December I loaded plain, brown Neville to document the season, again.

Fox Valley Photo Group colleague Giles La Rock encouraged me to contact Christine Styles and Collette La Rue at ArtScene/ArtStudio in DePere, who were looking for workshops to offer at their space. I drove up to meet with them. Winter workshops are always a little risky if the weather is bad, but look at the light pouring through all those giant windows!

Coming for their Yule visit, Andy and Kristin's flights changed at the last minute due to a snowstorm across most of the Northeast quadrant of the country and they forgot to send us the new itinerary. We were tracking the flights going through Detroit, and ended up at the airport about when they landed in Minneapolis. We decided to go to Barnes and Noble for a latte while we waited for their connecting flight to Appleton. I checked out the reference and education sections.

After running a near record mile time across the terminal in the Twin Cities, it was about lunch time when they finally got here. We went to Fratello's on the Fox.

It was a little early, so the place was pretty much empty, and I got up the courage to place the camera on one of those tables opposite us. If you look closely, you can see I was keeping an eye on the camera in case someone came down the steps.

Not as much dining by the ducks and pelicans out the window at this time of year.

Half of my half-sandwich and salad special. 

Kristin hadn't been to The Truffle Pig yet. We had made reservations as soon as we knew their schedule.

Andy on the Alvarez.

Alas, another peaceful assembly in Opera Square.

Rather sparsely attended, considering the behavior of the administration in Venezuela and Minneapolis that week.

An unusual composition that just occurred in the corner of the dining room. I could claim these were not brooms.

The University has a new Chancellor, so a planning process is inevitable. They held a public listening session, which included small table discussions. I was the only person associated with the University in my group. Interesting to hear their ideas about higher education. Nobody said anything about running it like a business, and a young alumnus gave an impassioned speech about maintaining a liberal arts curriculum.

Having had one of those liberal educations, I was interested when Photo Opp decided to have a book club.

Everyone was encouraged to bring a photography book that influenced them. This summer, I had helped organize the library at Photo Opp and came across this book about an English photographer, David Wilkie Wynfield. It attracted my attention because the portrait on the cover could easily be mistaken for one by Julia Margaret Cameron. Checking inside, I was surprised his work was contemporary with hers, which was pretty darn early in the history of photography.

Cameron once noted that he was the inspiration for her style. Nobody's heard of him because what he was doing was essentially club pictures of the Bloomsbury Group and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Draped with capes and various headgear, they were trying to appear timeless. A painter himself, it would have been career suicide to be thought of as a mere photographer.

On a visit to Stein's garden center in mid-January, deep discounts on the poinsettias.

Little globes to put your plants in.

The meeting of the Fox Valley Photography Group in our new venue in a smaller room in the Kaukauna Public Library, with a better HDTV monitor, compared to the old projector, but still not completely accurate when looking at photographs.

Building cameras in De Pere.

Podcast guest Monika is also a musician, and there was some talk of several former guests of the show who played an instrument, but they didn't mention me this time. After a 53-year hiatus, I've been performing at a monthly University Open Mic, held at Becket's bar. I haven't gotten the courage to set up a camera while I'm playing. This was supposed to demonstrate how everyone at the bar was conversing and not listening to the music, but it looks like the guy in the white shirt was at least facing the stage for the whole exposure. I remember seeing him there when I played, too.




Host of the event and a regular performer at the Open Mic is the Provost with his teenage son. For most of my career, until they re-assigned IT to the Business Division a half year before I retired, I worked in Academic Affairs, reporting directly to the Provost (not this one) for the last few years. That's my Warlock behind them. I had a Stratocaster and a Blues Junior in my office for three years, and no one noticed.

Still playing underground music in Hortonville.

Sarah undecorating the tree in the kitchen.

Another Saturday downtown, another murder to object to.

Unexpectedly, new colored lines and flags showed up in the snow. 

We were given three days' notice that they would be coming to do the maybe-it-has-lead-in-it water line replacement from the city's pipes into our house. We occasionally have to make sure a plumber has access, but this is the widest expanse of wall that's been exposed down here in a long time.

The first step with frozen ground is to pound it into powder with a pointy hammer.

In with the digger. Not as big as the hole this summer, but big enough to get a plumber in.

Some idea of the depth as they finish the hole with one guy directing around our internet fiber.

They eventually pulled the old pipe and the new pipe out through a hole in the cement floor of the basement, which they made with a jackhammer. No noise-cancelling headphones in case somebody accidentally locked the back door. Shiny new copper pipe and probably a digital meter with lots of wires grounding everything. There was a whole crew of electricians to do this. Very glad it's done, but they left the asphalt walk and the yard looking like a battlefield, so more fun in the spring.

Getting pretty desperate to get the film exposed in both cameras, I photographed The Natural Coffee Filters camera as it imaged the controls of my recently renovated Ventura guitar. Monika spoke about how acoustic guitars matched her music, and she could never get interested in electric guitars. There was an audible nodding of wise heads and isn't-it-obvious agreements that her choice was a natural match with analog photography. Wait a minute, this guitar was made in the 70s! It's totally analog, as are both my amps and other guitars. I assume you use an electric enlarger.

Then I used both cameras while I played the guitar.

That finished the roll. Honest, guys, I really love the podcast.

Neville has a hand-drilled .15mm pinhole 24mm from a 24x36 frame. The film was Kodak UltraMax 400 developed in a Cinestill powder C41 kit mixed in August.