World Stereoscopy Day: The Unseen Library

 

World Stereoscopy Day, led by the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy, occurs on June 21 each year, the anniversary of Sir Charles Wheatstone's presentation on Stereoscopy to the Royal Society in 1838. This is my fourth year participating.

Early this year, I made a stereo camera out of two Hughes Chocolate boxes just because they were the right size. Shortly thereafter, I arranged with the Oshkosh Public Library to do an exhibit in their new exhibit space. On a whim, I asked if I could use my new local-icon camera to do a series of stereo photographs so the public could experience the parts of the library where they are normally not allowed. They went for the idea right away, but I would have to be accompanied by Sandy Toland, Community Engagement Librarian, who organizes the exhibits.

I made a list of the scenes I'd like to get, and except for getting up on the roof, they were agreeable to all of them. We did three sessions. One roll of six pairs the first day, two rolls the second time, half of which I ruined, and a last session to repeat those. I ended up with 18 pairs.

There are three ways to view stereographs. In line here, they will be set up for Crossed Eye Viewing, which needs no additional equipment.  Crossing your eyes makes a double image. When you make the two inner images overlap in the middle, and focus on some element in the scene. It pops into three dimensions. Here's a link to an exercise that might help to learn this. For Parallel Viewing or printing for a classic Brewster Stereo Viewer, click here for a PDF.  For using Red/Blue glasses, click here for a PDF with Anaglyph versions (really big file).

The public sees the Circulation Desk from the other side each time they enter or leave. There are only two people captured in these stereograms. In the far background, just to the right of the column, someone is searching the catalog.

The Reference Services Librarians' office.  At the far right, Librarian Learns host Mike Macarthur is the only other person recorded.

The Library Administration office. I think the foggy area in the right frame (on the left here in crosseyed format) is a light leak. It's a great illustration of how your brain just picks the best parts of each image to form the image in stereo.

The Director's Office. When I met him weeks earlier, he expressed incredulity that his office would be photogenic. I told him everything reflects light and you can frame any shapes into a composition. He said he was going to use that line in meetings. He was in one when this picture was done. They went in and asked him so I could catch the sunbeams. I wonder if he knew I was coming that day?

Technical Services, where materials are acquired and processed. After graduating from college, I worked in the cataloging department at the UW-Stout library and was responsible for preparing materials for circulation. The basic unit of measure of progress is a book truck.

The Winnefox Libraries System Distribution Center - one big library with a unified catalog and circulation system for five counties.

 

Where the materials come and go.

The staff entrance and back stairwell.

The IT department.  In the basement, of course, but with a window.

The mechanical room.

The maintenance shop is predictably right next door.

The archives, including document boxes, leather-bound ledgers, loose photographs, ephemera and a cardboard robot from an earlier event.

Craft and activity supplies have their own well-ordered room.

Up to the top floor. The lunch room decorated for Valentine's Day. My good luck to be there when the decorations matched the furniture.

The gallery beneath the dome. 

Just outside the left door is this small seating area.

Turning around, the stairwell of the original building.

Down the other hallway, the meeting and staff development room, with its smart board and ultra-short throw projector. (Sorry, I'm a former AV guy)

I bought special lenses from Berezin 3D, but made the rest of three viewers out of foamcore and cardboard for visitors to view the stereocards. Viewers and cards survived the public touching the artwork for a month.

Hughie has two side-by-side 6x6cm chambers with .25mm pinholes on the axis and 8mm above it in both chambers, 30mm from the image plane. The film was Portra 800 developed in a Cinestill Liter Powder C41 Kit.

Happy Stereoscopy Day!

A Touch of Grey

I really never intended this to become a discontinued and expired film blog. They just keep finding me. First, it was a bulk roll of Tri-X and a box of 4x5 Plus-X I rescued when we got rid of the freezer in my department. Then Almon Benton gave me a twenty-year-old roll of super fine-grained Agfapan APX 25. Last year, Jonathon Gutow gave me some common Fuji 400 that was really old and poorly stored, which made horrible negatives, but I was surprised that they yielded reasonable pictures, although of course with Photoshop providing intense arbitration. I had good luck with an old roll of Ilford XP2 this spring, and got good results with some 220 format Kodak Portra NC 400 last month. When I saw four 120 rolls of Fujicolor NPS in the $5.00 bargain basket at Camera Casino, it seemed worth the chance.

It's a professional color negative film. The things I remember about the category of professional medium format films are that they cost more and were refrigerated in the store because their precisely calibrated color became intolerably less professional outside the correct conditions.

I remembered to ask how they were stored. They had no idea. Most of the rolls in that bin were given to them. It's a good bet, with the likely original buyer of this film being a pro, it was refrigerated until it got to the store. These rolls are pretty darn old, expired in 2001. 

Somewhat at random, I picked the AirPods Pro Box Camera for the trial.

I measured exposures at ISO 64, based on a four-year-old discussion on Photrio. The negatives look normal. The film does show its age. It is as slow as predicted, with noticeably low contrast. The color balance is somewhat muted but otherwise normal, if it's correctly exposed. When overexposed, it rapidly shifts toward cyan and underexposed toward magenta. With a wide angle like this camera provides (77 degrees), vignetting in the distant corners is a common issue. The centers are likely to be overexposed directly under the pinhole with my casual approach to timing exposures. That makes for some interesting negatives, but my friend Adobe and I could bring them around without extreme measures. I wouldn't call the color natural, but come on, it's pinhole photography, I'm not trying to be natural. My goal is to make the color not distractingly wrong, and I'm fine with some painterly freedom to the palette.

A good bit of the motivation was that it was a beautiful day and I was ready quite early in the morning. Trying out some old film would be a great excuse to go out and play pinhole. As I neared the railroad I passed the long plain back of a self-storage facility completely clad in dark grey siding. That reminded me of a project I had been considering. I've noticed that greyscale building exteriors have recently become the fashionable rage in architecture. That would be a funny test of the color rendition of the film. And you thought the blog title referred to the age of the film, or mine.

There is only one opening on that long stretch of aluminized clapboard, covered with perfectly matched steel siding.

Just across the railroad, another self-storage facility - white doors and gutters, but otherwise a medium grey.

 

Some colors show up at the YMCA, but it's mostly great slabs of grey.

It's not just the utilitarians and the modernists. The Corbett House, being publicly restored by a pair of realtors on Facebook, is covered in this dark monotone.

The brand new Day By Day Shelter is more noticeably grey on the other side, but they might not appreciate me photographing the front door. Here in the back, a staff member came out and waved when she drove out.

I documented the construction of Mackson Corners Apartments when it was just an elevator shaft, and shortly after it was finished.

The docks next to it on the river are also devoid of color.

A little lower contrast distribution of shades in the Annex Building across the road with matching utilities for my foreground.

From the river, Anthem Luxury Living looks like red brick with colored panels, but the street side is this monochrome facade.

The Brio Building strikes me as a disjointed stack of flat boxes

The Miles Kimball building, another I've covered since it was a windowless wall.

Anybody notice that, without a rising pinhole, this became an exercise in managing converging verticals? I had never noticed one-story Houge’s Bar was all grey until I was looking for something to finish the roll.

The AirPod Pro Box Camera has a .28mm pinhole 40mm from a 6x6cm frame.  The vintage Fuji was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.

Forms of memory and vegetation

The deadline for submission to the Pavlovka Pinhole Festival in Kyiv is soon. The first year I knew about it was the fateful 2022, when the call for photographs had already gone out with the theme I, Bridge-Builder. There was nothing I could think of that I had done that fit, and didn't want to trivialize the heroic statement that exhibit became. The next year was The Mirror. I sent three pictures that I thought were more than simple reflections. Last year, for Habitat, I took the cook's approach and submitted pictures of food and its preparation.

This year, the theme is Forms of Memory. When I heard that, I thought of these four photographs. I didn't contemplate the theme and develop the scenes. They just popped into my head. Hopefully, they're not too obvious.

Sarah's diary and writer's supplies. The pen didn't want to sit on the open book with the nib up. Sarah tried several positions, and then once, when she removed her hand, like magic, it stayed there as I aimed the camera and made the several-minute exposure.

Cooking tools. The other end of the six-inch chef's knife at the top was in last year's festival.

My steel knees.

Analog wave forms and Digital bits. 

Now I have to pick three and come up with a few lines connecting them.

Another purpose for this roll of film was to prevent getting a reputation as an outdated film blog, although I did just buy four more rolls of film, expired just after the turn of the Millennium. This roll is fresh, always frozen, humble Kodak Gold 200. 

Fresh, and one expired, fruit by the window. A little infinite depth of field fun.

Several days later, as I was preparing a tomato for Marcella Hazan's Chicken Fricasee, I was inspired to photograph these two remaining Constiluto Genoveses. In the fading light before it rained, the exposure was ten minutes. I went back to cooking and forgot about it until I went to set the table after an hour and a half, when the weather had cleared. It is possible to overexpose color film. This is about the best that could be done with the very dense negative. It's interesting how the spot in deep shadow in the center is about the right color.

A bounty of peonies waits to blossom.

A still day presents tempting opportunities for the pinhole photographer. A daisy with dewdrops holds perfectly motionless for a close-up.

Even among such formidable competition as the ferns, the invasive snow-on-the-mountain sneaks into the center of interest.

The Virginia Waterleaf is another that dominates No-Mow May. In several weeks it will entirely disappear.

My luck with the wind runs out when seduced by a peony bud lit with its own sunbeam.

The rose vines that have covered the arbor for the last few years failed to revive this year. Their vigorous growth last year made it dangerous to walk under the arbor. I cleared the vines without losing any blood! Now we're in an escalating arms race with the bunnies to get some morning glories established.

The Little Mutant has a .27mm pinhole on the axis and 11mm above it, 45mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Kodak Gold 200 was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.

Venerable film still worth it's salt.

I always check the film shelf at Camera Casino to see if there might be any bargains. In a bit of a hurry to pick up a print and get it to the frame shop, I grabbed three rolls of Portra 400 NC for five bucks a roll, not noticing that it was 220 format. As the leader tells you in three separate places, it's intended only for special equipment designed to handle it, for two reasons. It's twice as long as a 120 roll - 24 6x6cm frames and, in order to stuff that extra film around the same reel, it has no backing paper.

My Morton camera is definitely not special. Without backing paper with numbers to tell me where to stop, how will I know where the film starts and then how to wind the film without overlapping images? The first was easy. I loaded the camera in the dark. I could feel where the film started. Practicing with old backing paper I roughly determined how many turns of the winder would get me from one frame to the next - about one and a half. (This is the way most manufactured 35mm pinhole cameras recommend.) It looks like that's safely sufficient at the start, but as expected, as the diameter of the film on that reel increased, I was losing over half a frame each time. I only got 18 pictures.

To compensate for no backing paper to protect exposure from the counter hole, and no need to see numbers, I covered the hole with three layers of black masking tape, which wouldn't damage the camera when peeled off. I knew one layer wasn't completely opaque. The shutter handle was also taped closed so I wouldn't accidentally try to check it.  As evident in three of the negatives above, when exposed to outside daylight, the double-layer shutter with the masking tape wasn't sufficient to block the light through it. That was sort of a surprise. The rest of the camera, which is made of particularly heavy card stock with four layers and a black template everywhere but the shutters, seems light-tight otherwise. 

The 220 roll of film is much longer than 120, but with Paterson developing reels, which are designed to hold six-foot-long 36-exposure 35mm film, it fits with no trouble.

Portra 400 existed in two versions prior to 2011, Natural Color (NC), which these rolls are, and Vibrant Color (VC), so they are at least that old. I didn't ask at Camera Casino, but they were probably refrigerated if not frozen. Spoiler alert: it's old color film and it looks like it. It's at least a stop slow, particularly in dim light, and maybe fogged a little at the edges, but that could be the lack of backing paper again. The color balance isn't that far off, and the contrast mask isn't particularly dark. My favorite part, which just may be the spring humidity, is that the negatives dried perfectly flat.

As the C41 data sheets tell you after a lecture on capacity and shelf life, "if you accept the role as final arbiter of acceptable results," you can exceed the limitations noted. That goes for outdated film as well. Let's see what arbitration I can do with these negatives. (n.b. my C41 kit is well within the recommended limits.)

We had an eventful week and I didn't get to it for a while after I loaded the camera. It even rode around town on my bike rack without getting used. It's not surprising that the translucence of the counter hole was evident on the first frame.

Serendipitously, most of the rest of the roll was indoors. That .011-inch high E string is about the same size as the pinhole.

We installed a new bar in the pantry so the egg basket and the mugs hang straight and don't lean against the wall.

The shelf above the stove.

The analog coffee maker. You can see the film's reciprocity failing in the shadows.

Aware that there was an extra-long leader at the end, I needed a way to determine when to stop. For the first time ever, I kept a list of what photographs I'd done. I put an analog kitchen timer to use to avoid having to jump right up and silence a digital alarm.

The silent scream of the through-the-door icemaker and filtered water dispenser. Replaced twice while it was under warranty, it failed again soon after, and the water dispenser as well. It groans occasionally, trying to make ice, just to taunt me.

Shiny titles featured on top the piano.

I have always used Julia Child's "Seventeen-Minute Sit-in" method for hard-boiled eggs. You put them in a boiling pot, then cover it, turn off the flame and let it sit there. Kind of like semi-stand developing. I never see it in those science-lite articles about the best way to boil an egg.

The rest of the salad. This is a pretty tight crop so you can get a good look at the grain.

One of my photographs was accepted into a juried Photography show at the Center for Visual Arts in Wausau, Wisconsin, in the middle of the state. When I drove it up there, as is my wont, I took the opportunity to make some photographs in a new environment. Links: Madtown Monday  ·  All Day Long

The Curator invited me to look around the whole building. They're in a former bank.

Metal.

The chairs were behind a white screen, which nicely reflected the light back onto them. With a ninety-degree angle of view, Morton had no trouble getting back there.

My photograph in the show is of the stairwell in the Overture Center in Madison. Here is another in the series I never intended to start, but just keep happening on them. I opened the shutter for the five-minute exposure and went back into the gallery. There were two people in the adjacent classroom whom I asked if I could look in. They turned out to be the Executive Director and the Accountant. We talked about what a cool room it would be for teaching Pinhole Photography with its huge windows. When I got back to the stairwell, the automatic lights had gone off, for how long I did not know. I stood next to the camera, checking submissions to Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day and waited for another five minutes, which turned out to be about how long the lights stayed on. 

The gallery where the exhibit probably will be.

I then went out on the street. It's not too surprising in the first picture above that the counter hole appeared since it spent hours in the sun, but this day was cloudy and rainy. Within minutes in the brighter light, the counter hole was there. Despite keeping a meticulous record of the photographs, I managed to forget to advance the film and double exposed two of these. 

My plan for the other two rolls is to rate it at ISO 200 and completely line the interior of the camera with backing paper plus some 3M #235 Opaque Photographic Tape over that counter shutter for good measure. I'll start with one and three-eighths turns for the first eight, one and a quarter for the next eight, and just one for the last six. The last roll I quit at 22. If not for the double exposures, 6 of those would have been exposed onto the leader. Still not a bad deal for five bucks.

Morton has two hand-drilled .25mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The Portra NC was developed in a Cinestill liter powder C41 kit.