Old and new by available light

Each year Photo Opp holds a themed exhibition with a juried show and four featured artists. This year the theme is ALT., and they picked me! My submissions have not been selected for the juried show before. For the last two years, I submitted three pieces from the stereo solargraphic project, which didn't fit the themes very well. I'm included this time because pinhole is considered an alternate method, but I wanted to take it a bit further alt and show pinhole stereocards with my seven handmade stereo viewers. They don't take up much room, so I can put lots out. I even went so far as to edit some of the early stuff from the Stereo Populist.

About the time the invitation came there was a conversation on the Negative Influence podcast lamenting how much of photography was on electronic screens. People used to sit and look at albums of prints.  Hmmm.  That sounds like books. I had experience with print-on-demand projects as soon as it was available in 2003. Then an operating system upgrade killed my educator discount license to pre-subscription Adobe Creative Cloud, so making books became a tedious exercise without a specific page layout program. Recently I found Scribus, an open-source program that's probably equivalent to a late-90s version of PageMaker, which is quite a capable tool. Exhibiting a pile of books seemed like an alt process. I even redid the earlier ones with hard covers and premium inks.

Sharp-eyed regular readers may have noticed in the last post and in the first photograph above that the blue striped chairs have been reupholstered. One day when Sarah dropped into the furniture store about something else, they had a roll of very lush fabric they just happened to have left over. They put her in touch with their upholsterer. He even came and picked them up. It's really neat working with local craftspeople like this.

Just another sunbeam with the chairs in the background.

In a similar vein, I had learned the benefits of big fat frets and a straight neck from the renovation of my black solid-body Ventura guitar. The reason my hollowbody sunburst Ventura was hard to play was that it had very flat frets. Luthier Matt Hayes told me that, in the '60s, when this guitar was made, jazz players with a light right hand liked them so they could lower the action. I do not have a light right hand.

The pickups were chrome-covered humbuckers similar to the ones we replaced on the other Ventura, with the chrome worn off the bottom end. I suppose that looked pretty punk, but I didn't like it. After removing them, the cutouts in the body matched dog-eared P-90 pickups like those that would be on a very similar Epiphone Casino, popularized by the Beatles. Modern Seymour Duncan versions went into them. (Irrelevant note: The theme for the Fox Valley Photo Group this month is Bridges.)

The Fender Mini-Twin Tone was an impulse purchase at the counter at Heid Music, with the idea of marching in the streets leading protest songs. I installed strap buttons on it. Surprisingly beefy for a 1-watt amp with twin 3-inch speakers running off a 9-Volt battery. Haven't gotten up the nerve to take it down to Opera Square.

Some of this was driven by the most common feedback I got from my experience at the University open mics last year: "Could you turn your guitar down?" and "Do you ever play acoustic guitar?" Maybe the hollow body and the little amp would help with that? The Provost who organized these events got the job as Chancellor at my Alma Mater, Eau Claire, and no one has taken up the mantle. To stay motivated, I'm trying to work up a YouTube character or, leveraging my history degree, an educational performance: "Vietnam War protest singer covers the Little Red Songbook in the post-Ramones era."

After delivering the artwork to Photo Opp, we made an impulse decision to circumnavigate Lake Winnebago to visit Heritage Orchards and Polly's Pumpkin Patch. They include a diverse selection of pumpkins.

A very knobby green? blue? example.

Pale yellow.

Extremely warty.

They also have a petting zoo. Let's just say these animals are conditioned to expect a reward when someone approaches the fence.

While I adjusted the tripod and pointed the camera, there was a continuous discussion with the little horse as to whether the camera was food.

My favorite Manfrotto tripod suffered a fatal break of a leg extension and had to be demoted to iPad support duty (see above). I didn't like any of the combinations of features in the current Manfrotto offerings and had been admiring the SmallRig CT200 4-Section Lateral Center Column Aluminum Tripod/Monopod for a while. It was on the porch when we got home. This is obviously a life-changing experience. I have plans to do an extensive review, but just let me point out that extensible center column.

Getting close to things for pinhole photographs with very wide-angle cameras usually requires leaning the tripod onto the edge of a table or the piano keyboard, often involving easily disturbed arrangements. It's lots easier to set this thing on the floor and extend that arm toward the subject. It's a little tipsy at full extension, but my camera only weighs 90 grams.

That goes double for getting directly over a subject. That used to involve laying the tripod across a couple of chair backs (or pumpkins, see above).

It, of course, came with some accessories. An adapter for a very large camera, a cell phone holder – amusingly for such a heavy tripod (2kg, almost as much as your digital camera) – and a hex wrench, different from the one for all the other tripods. The very nice case has become a receptacle for all the tripod cases I also don't use.

An additional gift was a little bag in case you need to carry around a few pinhole cameras. Displayed here on Leigh Bardugo's conclusion of the Ninth House trilogy, which came in the same delivery.

It's kind of a tall tripod, but with that center column out like that, the legs become very easy to adjust to lower angles, and the arm makes it easy to get over things even on the ground.

We have had a good yield of hot peppers, which go through color transitions as they ripen. Initially, a desaturated green.

Orange transitioning to red.

Fully outfitted appropriate to their capsaicin content. Note the lower-angled tripod leg.

One of them fell off the vine (probably aided by a critter who later realized their mistake), so I used it to provide a little contrast to the last green tomatoes.

Morton has two .23mm pinholes, on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is a 220 format roll of Kodak Pro 400 MC, expired in 2001, developed in a C41 kit I mixed in March, now finally at its rated capacity, but it looks fine.

Photo Opp Loot Deep Dive

In a number of occurrences at Photo Opp, John Adams and I have had conversations concerning tripods. One was about a very sad event involving a headless set of legs from a vintage mid-century travel tripod John had found in contributions to Photo Opp, and an eBay prize I had acquired of a similar model, from which I had broken a leg section. The two could be married for one useful device. In a very humbling episode, I disassembled the two and then inserted the 3/8 inch screw from the legs into the 1/4 inch camera mount hole of the head instead of its base, and made sure I tightened it firmly, thereby completely ruining both parts when the jammed screw broke trying to undo it.

About a year later, John encountered a very nice example of one of these shiny devices at an estate sale and thought of me. When he gave it to me, I assured him it would be featured on Pinholica.

It's beautiful, but like its unfortunate predecessor, it's quite delicate. Designed to hold a lightweight folding camera for one exposure at a family gathering, I have been afraid to subject it to the rough and tumble of pinhole photography. 

I did, however, immediately think its glistening three-axis mount would make a really cool subject for close-up stereo photographs.

I will present them here as pairs set up for cross-eyed viewing, which is easy to learn. They are also displayed as red/blue anaglyphs, which require an appropriate pair of 3D glasses. Incidentally, I used Photoshop to make these anaglyphs since Anaglyph Workshop doesn't have enough sideways adjustment for these extreme close-ups. At this link is a PDF file with stereocards set up for a classic Holmes stereo viewer, which are also appropriate for parallel viewing (if you can make a picture out of those Magic 3D pictures, you can probably view these without the scope).

Despite the non-existence of extreme wide-angle in lensed stereo photography, I chose the 90-degree angle-of-view Badgersette to do cha-cha stereo, where one camera is moved between left and right exposures. The Unseen Library project was done with a regular stereo camera with a similar angle of view, and I have successfully done very close-up stereo with a 67-degree camera. The half-again-wider device should be fine.

The front of the joint from about 50mm away with a 10mm baseline between images.

From the other side. Look at how different these two images are. Can you believe your brain does this all the time without trying?

It seemed appropriate to show it with another object chosen for it's beauty, the Beauty Super II rangefinder from Photo Opp's rummage sale, also still innocent of film since I got it. Still pretty close up for stereo. The sideways adjustment on the quick release adaptor on the K&F tripod only travels 20mm, so I had to revert to using a ruler to keep the camera parallel while it was moved 30mm between exposures.

The maximum height of the new tripod is only 1.2 meters. I also have a tripod that extends to two meters, acquired at that same rummage sale, but it's only held a camera for two or three photographs. Using a stick to keep the camera parallel during the move and the ruler to get back to the normal 60mm baseline.

Another acquisition from the sale was a light stand and umbrella, which I also haven't made any use of photographically, but makes a great subject for stereo photography. This time sliding the tripod along a broom handle, also at a baseline of 60mm.

Expired film from the 20th century picked up from my association with Photo Opp has gotten well used. A five-roll pack of 220 format Kodak Pro 400 MC and the specially adapted Morton to use it in, with a roll of Ilford XP2 depicted on the iPad behind them. Back to sliding just the quick-release adaptor to its maximum 20mm.

The Badgersette has two hand-drilled .23mm pinholes on the axis and 11mm above it, 30mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film was Kentmere 400, semi-stand developed in Rodinal 1:100. The tripod with the sliding quick-release adaptor is from K&F Concepts.