An evil cube template

Regular readers may have noticed that the camera I've used most often in the past two years has been the Evil Cube (6cm from 6x6cm frame). I've used it for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Days in 2017 and 2018, it went to Massachussets for my son's wedding, and it was one of the two medium format cameras I took to Europe last fall. I chose it when I went out into a blizzard recently.

It was made from cutting pieces of flat matte board and taping and gluing them together, sort of figuring it out as I went along. When I was loading it for Pinhole Day, I wondered if I could make a template that would fold and glue together like my other cameras so anyone could make one. I think I accomplished it. Here’s a link to directions to build this camera.

There's really no technical need to design a new camera.  The image format is exactly the same as a 6cm 120 Populist. But there's the issue of form factor.  When I made the Evil Cube, and the Glenmorangie Evil Cube and Compact 120 before it, my inspiration was an unreachably-expensive-in-my-youth medium format SLR. (Never mind that it's sort of the same form factor as a million mid-century Brownies, Hawkeyes, and Pioneers. I never had one of those either.)  I've recently seen a forum thread where the NOPO 120 was gushed over for it's similar shape, so I'm not the only one with this obsession.

As long as I was making a new camera, I thought I'd see if I could improve a couple issues.

The classic winders for a 120 Populist are 3/8" dowels with the ends shaped to fit into the slot of a 120 film reel, with an opaque collar glued around it to reduce the chance of light leaks through the winder holes, and with a WinderMinder over the collars to keep the winders from falling out, itself held on by a rubber band.  The problem is that the diameter of the dowels is a little small to give much torque when winding and your fingers can get really tired gripping that little thing.  I've been glueing them into the plastic cap end of a cork bottle stopper which works really great, but then you can't put a WinderMinder over it to make sure they stay put. I make my winders really tight and put tape over the tab to make them tighter in the slot, and that works, but it's a little bit of a kluge.  And the WinderMinder is a separate part that could blow away when you're reloading in the field.

The other thing that I wanted to play with was the rising front pinhole.  I got kind of interested in this with the Pinhole Lab Camera, and I recently found out the Reality So Subtle cameras have one. Recently, trying to minimize the impact of converging verticals with Stella at the Public Museum and the Paine Art Center made me wish I had this option. This may be considered trying to guilt you in to staying around and looking at the pictures below, but I really like the rising front pinhole.

The camera is made made from four main folded parts.  The image chamber and the film holder are first glued together to make the inside assembly.  You have to do something to keep your film reels parallel or your film is going to jam up.  In the Populists, it's a box just larger than the film.  In the original Evil Cube with it's triangular space for the film bay, I inserted some cut off nails through the bottom, but those are little parts that can get got lost. The simplest solution to me was a double layered piece of cardstock, the same thickness as the flange on the film reel, glued where the reel would be pressed when the winder was inserted into the top and held there firmly when the camera is closed. That should keep the bottom of the film reel from wandering.  It seems to have worked. (later edit: I subsequently made significant improvements to this.)

The film is loaded wrapped around the inside assembly.

This assembly is then inserted into the back, and the winders are inserted throught the holes and into the film reels.

The front then slides over the back in a gap between a collar and a cork stopper on the winders, which solved the problem of the winders falling out.

For the rising front, making a a pinhole that actually went up and down is way too complicated for me (another later edit: I figured that out too, but it takes more room), so I took the simple way out, two pinholes, one higher than the other.  It took me seven tries to get two identical pinholes at .3mm. I was a little disappointed to not get them a little smaller, but to entice you again, I don't think that's an issue with the pictures.

The rising pinhole is 15mm over the on-axis pinhole.  That was just a guess. It was far enough to make sure I could keep one covered while the other was opened. According to Mr. Pinhole, there's a 115mm image diameter at this distance, so I've got a little area to play with. It turned out to be a very useful rise, and I hardly noticed any vignetting.

For the shutters I just made one big really wide shutter, and cut the moving part in half. The over and under shutters open to the side, which ever handedness you prefer.

I really like the rising pinhole (or should that be The Risen Pinhole?)

All this is happening at f200, and moderately wide angle, 53 degrees. I think most people consider 80mm normal for this format.

So as is my wont, I went for a test on a bicycle ride around Oshkosh. This was my first experience with TMax 100 as well.

You knew I was going to start with the rising pinhole. The stone clad modernish Evangelical Lutheran Church on Church Street is connected to what I think is their older clapboard covered church behind it on Parkway.  This is the joint between the two.

Turning to the left, the almost-third-quarter moon was just barely visible to the right of the bell tower.  Despite getting some grey scale to the blue sky, I can't see a trace of it in the negative.  Anyway, how about those parallel verticals, and there's a seagull sitting on the left pylon if you zoom in to full resolution.

Next door, I couldn't get far back enough from the Morgan House to get the rising pinhole shot I wanted and kept getting the sun in one of the windows from that angle. So I thought, damn the converging verticals, I'll just point the camera up and use the on-axis pinhole. This is the only time I used it. Picked up a little flare anyway, and there's another seagull on the chimney.

The Public Safety Building is an equilateral triangle. Do you think they engraved those lines in the walls just to challenge me?  I was surrounded by police cars when I took this.

On the other side of City Hall, there's a hidden little courtyard with a table and bench between The Beach Building and a city garage, with this rather large tree kind of espaliered up the wall.

The back end of the Grand Opera House, with yet another seagull on the chimney.

I've tried to photograph this wall of the old Miles Kimball Building several times. Using a wide-angle camera pointing up making it look like it's falling over really distracted from what I want to portray.  Now with the rising pinhole, here's the left side of the wall.

Using the sidewalk to make sure I kept the camera parallel, the right side of the wall from twenty yards down.

And here's the diptych you're trying to imagine.

Sarah had an interview here once and described the interior as Dickensian. They used to hire artists to do drawings as piece work from a photograph of someone's house to put on Christmas cards. They're going to renovate it into an apartment building with a restaurant on the ground floor and a bar on the top. That should be a good place to take pinhole photographs. Here's the front of the building from the empty lot across the street.  It appears I didn't make sure my film was tight and I got a bit of a curve to the horizontals toward the top.  It's kind of funny that I was trying to be pinholey by waiting until a white car made streaks going by, but the camera upstaged me with the curvy film.  This combination of the view camera correctness of the verticals with pinhole funhouse cracks me up.  It looks like the building has a raised eyebrow.

This is the new "Sawdust" development area where an arena was built for a Milwaukee Bucks minor league team. The city is hoping it will spur all sort of hip development in what is a pretty blighted area. It used to be the factory district and there are still a few industrial buildings active in the area.

Restoration of the area is going slowly.

Just next door is this little brick building given a little bit of a Loony Tunes look by curved film again.

All with the new Evil Cube. two .3mm pinholes 6cm from 6x6cm frame on Kodak TMax 100 developed in Rodinal 1:50. Also with the Manfrotto Compact Advanced Aluminium Tripod extended out to it's full 66 inch height.

Ektar in the Evil Cube

The next modification I do to my cameras should be one of those little slots where you slide the flap from the film box to identify what you've got loaded in there.  Sometime pre-holidays, I loaded the Evil Cube with Ektar 100. I think I might have expected to do pictures outside.  Several weeks later I actually started shooting but I thought it was loaded with Portra 400.  They both have the light grey markings that are hard to see.

So I underexposed everything by two stops..  I thought the negatives looked thin, and then when I went to put them in the scanner I saw the Ektar marking and figured it out.

But ya gotta try to see if you can recover anything, and it turns out I got some images I like.  Ektar really doesn't like being underexposed so there's a lot of Carravagian shadows, and some shiftiness of the color that's kind of interesting.

Sarah’s animalmorphic lens.

Flowers from Andy for Sarah's birthday.

Fruit by the west kitchen window.

I can't seem to slice bread without going off at some crazy angle.

The tips of some flowers in a sunbeam through the south kitchen window.

Roses drying in a bowl.

The leaded glass window in the stairwell.

The afternoon before Christmas

An autumnal display that persisted into the holidays.

All with the Evil Cube.  .3mm pinhole 6cm from 6x6cm frame on Kodak Ektar 100.

My pinhole day.

I have been having such fun lately with the Evil Cube that I decided to continue with it for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, with a few insurance exposures with The Populist. My general impression is that I did a lot of nice safe academic compositions.

My first shot in the morning. I had noticed this backlit leaf the day before and I knew the weather (ergo lighting) was going to be about the same on Pinhole Day.

The weather was cold, rainy, windy and dark, but you take what you get so I ventured outside.  I took a picture of this gazing ball at dawn one year on pinhole day, but it was a little later in the morning this year.

I had to go through the back porch to get outside and noticed these pansies waiting for the weather to be decent enough to plant them.

I knew I could trust the ceramic bunnies to hold still in the wind and I'm surprised that being on the screened porch was protection enough that the fern held still as well.

Spenser's passage. I thought I was being really careful about making sure the film was tight, but looks like it was warped a little.

A display of fruit on the kitchen table.

You'd think after all that time and film expended up there, I would have avoided the upstairs all together.

On a dark day, if it makes sense to work near the window, you might as well just photograph the window itself. Justin has been promoting the slogan "Action against refraction," but maybe there's some chance you can work with it without compromising pinholiness.  The beveled glass in the front door window. Not an oriel window, but as close as I could get.

You can also modify the light coming in with variably translucent materials.

I was trying to avoid really long exposures so I could keep shooting, but since I wasn't using the Populist as my primary instrument, I used it to get this two hour exposure in the garage attic for insurance.

As long as I was out there retrieving it, I picked up a quick one in the garden.

I've already blogged about my stereo solargraph attempt, and as I predicted, it turned out not to be my submission to the WPPD gallery.

The image I eventually chose to submit was from the middle of the day in the garden, a tulip coming up through a rose bush.

I mean it's really sharp (ha, ha). It is notable that this tulip was braced by the fairly rigid rose bush so that it didn't flutter in the wind.  Here's another example of the illusion of shallow depth of field. There were several pretty stiff gusts during the 20 second exposure. (Kodak Portra 400) The globe flowers in the background fluttered quite a bit rendering them more softly and looking for all the world like it was done with a large aperture.  Sarah thought it looked a little like a bird attempting to take flight. I guess I saw some sort of metaphor for the struggle for existence.

A couple additional notes.

Sarah did an incredible job with the Chaneloflex.  We added pearl viewfinders to it for this year. Here's her submission.  

Sorry, Justin, more toying around with refraction. Does this make it an animalmorphic lens?

I think I win the pinholiness award because I took the picture of the Evil Cube to accompany my submission with the Populist.  Anybody else take their camera picture with a pinhole camera?

And lastly, from the Populist mounted on yet another tripod, what our living room looked like the morning after. I used all five tripods at some point in the day.

A new Evil Cube

The Glenmorangie Evil Cube was an interesting try, but because of limits on the size of the original box and limits I set myself to feature the design of the original whiskey packaging, it never lived up to my expectations.  The nail in the coffin was that the images it produced were only 6x5 cm. Just wasting that much film made it evil.

But I was still enamored of the format. Work I had done with the 120 Stereo Populist made me want to play with the 6x6cm square format more.  I liked the 6cm pinhole to film distance with that size film (vertically about the same as the Populist), and I'm enough of a metalhead to be attracted to 666 numerology. I intended to make this camera for a long time. I bought the cardstock about a year ago, did the template drawing on the computer last spring, printed the template about the beginning of July and finally made the camera Labor Day weekend.

It's all made from flat stock put together with Aleenes tacky glue and 3M#235 tape. I did one template for the top and bottom of the film holder and outer box, and one for the front and back. I taped the template to the cardstock and cut out the parts. The internal dividers and the outer sides I just measured and cut to fit after I had everything else put together.

The front and film holder are one part and the outside box another.

I used some cut off nails to insert into the film reels at the bottom to keep them parallel.  The winders are oak 3/8" dowels with the ends sculpted to insert in the slot on the 120 reel.  The film loads in the normal box camera up-and-around-the-sides style

The collars on the winders are made out of several layers of 3M #235. That was easier to cut than anything else, and it's flexible and thin enough to slide between layers.

I extended the front a little around the sides and had to add some baffles and put some felt inside the channel where the back joins the front to eliminate light leaks after testing it in the sun with a strip of photographic paper. A second test was completely clear.

The flexible winder collars slip under the front of the box and the rubber bands keep them firmly down on top the camera and keep them from falling out and getting lost.

It requires a loosen-supply-then-advance-the-takeup method for winding the film. but it seems to go smoothly and fast enough for pinhole.

I've been using Gilder electron microscope apertures for the last ten years.  They're so perfectly round, on really thin metal and are terribly cheap compared to pinholes sold specifically to be used for pinhole photography, but lately I've been feeling a conflict of making a homemade camera, and then buying the pinhole.  Ever since I got a scanner where I could really accurately measure them, I've been hand drilling the pinholes in .003 inch brass. I hold the brass against the hard surface of a table and just pierce it with the tip of the needle. It was pretty easy to get it to be .29mm, which Mr. Pinhole says is ideal for 6cm from the film. It's not as perfect as the Gilder aperture, but it's not bad, and the pictures look pretty good.

The shutter and a shutter for the film counter are three layer sliding shutters.  That works out pretty well in the front since the pinhole is recessed enough that it makes a usable "lens" hood.

I stuck some beaded pins for viewfinding gun sights and covered it all over with 3M #235 for that leatherette feeling. After that long delay in getting started, I loaded it with role of Arista.edu 400, exposed it all and developed it in Microphen 1:1. in one day.

This was about ten o'clock in the morning,

For this picture, the tripod was leaning against the couch where, like a genius, I decided to sit to prevent the cats from bumping the tripod.  This image really screams for color so I'm planning to do it again (and go to another room during the exposure.)

I spent about a year once photographing nothing but this kitchen window.

I wasn't even in the house during most of this exposure.

This kind of strikes me as having kind of a Bruce Davidson or Diane Arbus feel to it, except there's no people in it.

Would you believe it was me if I didn't include a self-portrait?

I kinda like this camera so far. Put one of the rolls of Portra 160 that Sarah gave me for Christmas in it.

I was a bit surprised that it turned out to be so compact, so it's not only evil, but it's sneaky too.  This should be fun.