Supper Club Shorty

I had several objectives in making this camera

• I wondered if you can make a 120 Populist out of a single six pack carrier.  No,  you can't. I used plain black poster board for much of the secondary card in the camera interior.
• Since I had just gone on about making a moderately telephoto camera (more on this in the future), I thought it only fair to go to the wide angle end, although it's really the same specifications as the 10th Anniversary iPhone Box camera.  I didn't edit the Populist template, I just cut the 45mm one down to this pinhole to film distance. (I probably will edit it and include it with the others)
• I've always wanted to make a camera out of a Supper Club six pack.  It has my favorite beer slogan: "Not Bad."  It would seem that mere lack of objectionable qualities would be a pretty tame compliment, but in Wisconsin, it's actually being quite laudatory.

It has a 6x6cm image area 35mm from pinhole to film - 81 degrees; somewhat wide, but in the world of pinhole actually kind of moderate. There was only enough cardboard to go 37mm. I didn't want to go wider since I don't particularly like vignetting.

I drilled a .27mm pinhole. Mr. Pinhole says .249 is optimal.  Close enough for jazz.

The winder minder is made out of the handle of the carrier. It's already a double layer of card, and I thought it nice to feature Capital Brewery. Middleton, Wisconsin by the way, on Madison's west side.

Otherwise follow the basic recipe.  The interior is painted with three coats of ultra matte black paint.

The carton design is the same on both sides, so I shifted it down a little on the back to feature the "A Wisconsin State of Mind" motto and again, to ID the brewery.

It is pretty wide angle.  Here's the mantle and bookcases with sunbeams that I shoot with about every camera. I'm usually behind the couch to get this view, but this is from the middle of the room.

Very handy for interiors. You can get in just about the whole living room from the archway to the dining room.

The east wall of the kitchen.

Really useful when you can't get very far away from something.  The tripod was right up against a giant electrical box that I think holds transformers for the lights.

Because you're so close to things and you have to tilt up to frame tall objects, it often looks like they're falling backward. However, you can mitigate that, as I do here, getting on top of a picnic table with my new birthday-present-from-Sarah tripod that extends out to five and a half feet high.  (Did you notice it in that first picture at the top of this post?)

Of course, extreme wide angle distortion is just fun, especially from weird angles (again courtesy of the new Manfrotto)

When near the ground, everything looks monumental.

Although it often surprises me that although I commonly use what I would have called extreme wide angle cameras in my youth, I only rarely see what is often referred to as wide angle distortion in my photographs.

I know I've been deficient in using these recent cameras to do photographs relating to the theme of camera exterior, so here's a photograph of a glass of a classic Wisconsin lager.

Now that I got that photo, what am I going to do with this beer?

Pictures of the camera done with Sarah's Nikon D750. Nice camera.

The film for the pinhole pictures was Lomography 100.  Not bad.

Visitation

Gene and Laura and their dogs came from out west to visit us in Oshkosh.

Chatting in the living room.

Arthur and Bob got comfortable.

It was nice enough to go out on the porch.

Dinner in the dining room.

Brunch at Fratellos.

And when we were leaving, I attempted a handheld shot, but didn't get my fingers far enough out of the way.

All with the New Glarus Populist. .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame.

Roadtrip: Aztalan

In the 1830's, the ruins of a Native American settlement were discovered in Jefferson County. The guy who did the earliest archeology there named it Aztalan after the mythic northern home of the Aztecs because, under the influence of the popular writings of Alexander Von Humboldt about Mesoamerica, he thought the mounds looked like Aztec ruins.

Although there is some evidence of occasional habitation for a long period, it was a bustling small town between about 1100 and 1300 CE  - the northernmost incursion of the Mississippian people, most often associated with Cahokia in Illinois - and then they just split and no one knows why.

The town was completely surrounded by a stockade that was covered with wattle and daub. Everything you see is a recreation.  In 1968, the mounds were re-sculpted to their original terracing and just enough of the stockade was rebuilt (out of telephone poles) so your imagination can fill in the settlement, especially when, like Sarah and I were on a Thursday morning, the only people in the whole park. This also happened to us at Natural Bridge State Park last year.

Periodically there were these enclosures that were probably defensive towers.

The central feature is a terraced mound that was constructed by humans carrying buckets of dirt.

There was some kind of structure on the top and a nice view of the whole site.

The Crawfish River which was a rich resource borders the settlement on one side,  behind a profusion of goldenrod.

If you ignore, for a second, the pre-historic aspects, it's a big native Wisconsin prairie. Wild white morning glories dot the landscape nestled among the grasses.

And some kind of snapdragon bush.

All with the New Glarus Populist.  .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x35mm frame.