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.

De Camera from De Pere

 

Not deterred by a high temperature of six degrees below zero Fahrenheit, five artists and I made pinhole cameras at ArtScene in De Pere a few weeks ago and used them to take pictures. 

It was -14°F. when I left home. Everything had to be stuffed inside the Mustang. Rodinal and fixer would be the only things that would freeze in the trunk, but going back inside with stuff at these temperatures will condense buckets of water out of warm air. Wet cardboard is hard to work with.

Some of the group went out into that frigid air to take photographs, but the venue was pretty bright inside for the rest of us. I missed emphasizing some things while building and loading, which led to more film advance issues than I've had before, so I spent a bit of the afternoon with my hands in a changing bag (in addition to the time to load the film on the developing reels later on). These issues could be easily solved for a second roll of film, but tempus fuget.

So I didn't take any photographs (well, with this camera). Mine is the Natural Coffee Filters at the upper left, specifically using a black box for the camera body, and a red box for the shutters and WinderMinder to show what's going to be visible on the finished camera. I didn't record the size of the demonstration pinhole.

The next week, eager to implement some of the things I learned, setting up for the next session, this camera sat idle for a week. This was exacerbated by the gloomy winter weather, which I always complain about. Suddenly, a sunbeam appeared.

Chasing the sunbeam into the next room.

Just to the right, a close-up of the earring carousel.

In the sun room as well.

Père Noël highlighted by a late sunbeam hiking in the stairway window.

The sunbeam reflected off the satin finish oak door, creating an unusually bright, diffuse light on the dining room table.

This double exposure may be the universe's way of telling me to quit taking so many pictures from my normal spot on the couch. Exposed on top of that is the headstock of my black Ventura guitar with new black tuners, which, except for the logo and a few strings, is nearly invisible here since it doesn't reflect much light.

It's a very accurate clone of a Gibson L6-S, done sometime during the "lawsuit era." Gibson only made the L6-S between 1972 and 1979. The Ventura brand was then owned by the Japanese company Kaman Industries, which made Ibanez and Ovation, and was likely made in the same factory. It's distinguished by the six-position rotary switch that selects the pickups in different combinations.

It was OK, but I never really played it much. The idea of giving it an upgrade occurred to me sometime last fall. After abandoning a fantasy of doing it myself, I brought it to Heid Music to get the just OK chrome-covered pickups changed to Seymour Duncan Black Winter Blackened Matte Black high output Humbuckers designed for "any genre demanding pure sonic armageddon". The glossy blackletter logo is visible on the neck pickup. With black tuners and all the shiny little screws prominent, it really looks Metal. I'm naming it Kuro.

When luthier Matt Hayes got a look at it, he told me he couldn't really level the frets because they were so worn. It never occurred to me that someone might have played it a lot before I got it, when it was already three decades old. With a new nut and complete refretting, though, it would be like a new guitar. Go for it. Now with the restored neck and the high-output humbuckers, I really love this guitar. My goal was to make a unique instrument, and I think I've done it. Now it looks and sounds like my guitar. Anybody know how to tarnish the chrome bridge and tailpiece?

Natural Coffee Filters has a somewhere around .23mm pinhole, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Kentmere 400 semistand developed in Rodinal 1:100.

The January of Our Discontent

The weekend after the invasion of another country to kidnap an unpopular dictator (similar to one that's just been pardoned) and profit from oil again, and the enthusiastic on-camera approval of the murder of Renée Good by the federal government, I again joined the ongoing peaceful assembly to seek redress of our grievances. This really brought me back to the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State murders. I only took one photograph.

 

A few weeks later, after claims of imperialist command over the entire hemisphere, insulting the partners in our last major invasion of an unpopular dictator a few years ago (and destroying most of his subjects' civic infrastructure), and praise of another public murder so obvious it even upset the NRA, I again went down to Opera Square.

My former colleague Al Lareau, emeritus professor of German Language and Culture, specializing in the era of the Weimar Republic, so he knows a Nazi when he sees one.

This quilter brought her art to the cause with one of the more complex puns around.

The organizing group is called Peaceful Patriots and Old Glory is always prominently featured, but's also obvious that it's following the Constitution we're talking about, not blind adherence to a madman or 18th century aristocrats.

Revere's owner gave him this low-key sign because he's such a sweet dog and she imagined he would be upset if he knew what we were here for.

Blowin' in the Wind was playing on a bluetooth speaker nearby this aluminum foil-wrapped cubic sign atop a long pole. How many times must a man look up before he can see this sign?

This lady was skeptical when asked for permission to photograph her, but assented when told that it was the sunglasses and the pink megaphone that attracted me. My primary motivation here is documentary, but I do want visually interesting photographs,

I warned this couple I would probably characterize them as the younger generation. That prompted the raised gloved fist. I wonder if he knows who Tommie Smith and John Carlos are? Conversing about my vintage methods, we got into a discussion about the mutability of language, such as when someone proudly uses the term conservative today, they usually mean racist fascism.

I was around when Godwin's Law was first proposed, that every argument on the internet will quickly narrow to a comparison to Adolf Hitler, but if you tried to match a playbook and the rhetoric, one could see the association today was Pretti Good. Whether it was Mein Kampf or just a collection of speeches is in dispute. It's a little surprising to hear he's read anything at all.

And now a word from our sponsor. Isn't pinhole photography and film amazing?

The Diversity 30 has hand-drilled .23mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Lomography 400 developed in a Cinestill Powder C-41 kit.