The Populist: a derivative.

I should preface this post with this cartoon which appeared in an issue of the CoEvolution Quarterly, a magazine published from 1974 to 1985, founded by Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog. This cartoon has been displayed somewhere in our house ever since (Hand colored by Sarah)

Shortly after I posted the directions for the Populist on-line, an editor from Barnes and Noble sent a message to Gregg Kemp's Pinhole Visions email list indicating that they were thinking of producing a package with a book on Pinhole Photography that included a kit with everything you needed to make a pinhole camera, and could anyone recommend a paper engineer to help them out.

I responded that I was certainly no paper engineer (if you follow this blog you know just how funny that idea is), but just to get some idea of the kind of thing that was available for free on-line, sent them the link to the Populist. 

Much to my surprise, she responded several months later and asked if I would like to be involved in the project. I was concerned that if I did, I would have to take down the on-line version, which would have been philosophically distasteful  (after all, it is a camera anyone can make). Her response was that the populations who might buy a kit browsing in a Barnes & Noble and those downloading plans on the internet didn't overlap very much. And they offered me money for it.  Not enough to retire on, but enough to make Christmas a lot more fun that year. 

They just wanted the rights to use the design but they'd like me to kibbitz on what they did with it. We worked together on and off for about six months.

It came out in time for the 2009 holiday season as Create your own pinhole camera bundled with the  book Adventures with pinhole and home made cameras by John Evans which they had previously published in 2003. The book is pretty comprehensive and well done, but it's kind of obvious that the kit and book weren't done as an integrated piece. I'm not credited anywhere, nor is the Populist mentioned as the basis for the camera.

It's still available on-line for $16.99.  It's got eight reviews with an average rating of 3.9 so it must work, although one of the reviews criticizes the recommendations for exposure.

The directions booklet follows the outline for the Populist pretty well, but all the photographs were redone with the materials from the kit of course, and the text rewritten by a professional copywriter. There's still a little bit of my text in there.  It's really pretty well done.

The camera you see in the photo at the top of this post isn't made from the kit.  They sent me a proof printed on the final material before they made the final dies to cut it out, so I had to cut the parts out with an X-acto knife. It all went together all right and no changes were necessary in the final product. They didn't include any pinholes, and I never exposed any film in it.  I've never put together the final product they sent me,

There are some changes from the original Populist design. They didn't like the idea of the corners being taped because they wanted it to look like a real camera. The box is held together with glueing flaps. I had considered that for the Populist, but I was concerned about the corners being light tight, and if you were going to cover them with opaque tape, the flaps weren't necessary to hold the box together. They did include a roll of black tape and the directions indicate to use it in the internal box, but the tape is no where near opaque.  Since the film in the side chambers is enclosed in a cassette, I've often wondered if the opaque tape was necessary on the corners and have been meaning to make a camera with clear tape to find out. Since no reviews said anything  about light leaks, it's probably not a problem.

Another change was the addition of a second winder and the placement of the rewind hole on the top.  In the original Populist, I thought making a second winder was an unnecessary hassle, and I put the rewind hole on the bottom so it would rewind in the same direction as for winding and suggested just inserting a piece of card stock between the two boxes to cover it except when rewinding. 

One change they made that I'm not too thrilled with was the addition of a frame at the top of the shutter to act as a handle, and as the viewfinder.  On the Populist I include viewfinding triangles to go on the top and sides of the camera.

To be honest, if you put your eye up to the back of a camera as you would with an SLR, it does include just about what the camera will capture.  In this day of people viewfinding through phones and LCD panels on the back of the camera I don't think a lot of people will be doing that.  And if you think of the common ways this camera is going to be supported, sitting on some table or bench, maybe supported by a tabletop tripod, getting your head in the right place is going to be nearly impossible. I'm also a big fan of closeups and this is also going to introduce a fair amount of parallax error if you do look through it. It's kind of floppy and I don't think it would survive many trips in and out of a pocket, and (this is one of those times that sound more like a religious argument) its not very pinholey.

They wanted to include two sizes of pinhole and a blank piece of brass to drill your own pinhole.  In order to accommodate that, I suggested a new part to attach the pinhole to which snugly slides inside the exposure chamber with folded flaps that held the pinhole tightly in the front of the camera.

The pinholes they included are supposed to be .2 and .15mm and look to be fairly close so I'm not sure about the criticism in one review that exposures in bright sun required minutes rather than seconds. They appear to be drilled either with a laser or an electric spark. Until I started writing this post, I had never gotten them out and looked at them. I hate to say this, but they're really terrible pinholes. They appear to be roughly the right size, but they both have really ragged edges. The larger one seems to have a raised blister around it, and the smaller one is more semicircular than round. Almost anyone with the least bit of care could drill a better pinhole. I suppose to be fair, I should put them in a camera and try them out.

When it was first released my son saw it on a shelf in a Barnes and Noble in Boston, but otherwise I've never seen any mention of anyone using it, and never seen one mentioned in a post to the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day gallery.  About a year after it was released, I asked how it was doing and they said it was OK.  It's sales rank on Barnes and Noble is 93,217, but they sell a lot of books so that doesn't really mean anything.

Last year I was sent a request to put a link on the Pinhole Day site resources page from someone in Italy and was surprised to see the camera featured on the home page, so I guess it's gotten around.

If anybody has used one, I'd be curious to hear about it.

I've always been a little perplexed by the design on the front, but recently realized it was a stylized version of looking straight on to a bellows folder.  You know, a real camera.

Roadtrip: The Museum of Wisconsin Art

I've never been to West Bend.  When I moved to Wisconsin and told people we came from South Bend, Indiana everyone misremembered it as West Bend. We saw a segment on a Wisconsin tourism show that featured the Museum of Wisconsin Art, which we had never heard of and looked cooler than I would have expected, although Wisconsin does boast some pretty heavy hitters – Georgia O'Keefe, Edward Steichen and Frank Lloyd Wright.  Among pinhole notables, Ruth Thorne Thomsen is from Door County. (later edit: I was wrong about that but she did do work there.)

Sarah needed to replace some specialized light bulbs so we stopped at the Kristopher Kringle Shoppe since it was right on the way in Fond du Lac.

It's crammed with decorated Christmas trees and every sort of collectible figurine or miniature village you can think of.  Surprisingly cheering on a bleak, windy February morning.

Six rooms full of the stuff on two floors.

West Bend has several really interesting sounding restaurants, but they're all open only for dinner, so for lunch you're left with the chains out by Highway 45, or the bars downtown.  You can't go too wrong by picking a microbrewery.  This dining room is probably pretty cheery in the summer.  The Milwaukee River with a nice patio is right out those windows.  Kind of dark and drab in February.

The Museum is a new building shaped like a rather severe acute triangle that points due north.  The point is made of windows and a stairway.

It is focused on work of artists born in, or who worked in Wisconsin for a significant time.  It includes the largest removable framed painting in Wisconsin, The Flagellents by Carl von Marr (born in Milwaukee but mostly worked in Munich).  After being exhibited in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, it was bought by someone from Wisconsin and actually belongs to the Milwaukee Art Museum.  Kind of a gross idea, but surprisingly unbloody for the subject. It's 14 x 23 feet and from the bench I had the tripod on I didn't expect to get the whole thing in the frame. Does it occur to anyone else that somehow I must have bowed the film plane somehow to create those curves at the top and bottom of the frame.

The south end of the building has the special exhibitions gallery, a reception area and another windowed stairway.

The Wisconsin Biennial juried show was the current special exhibit.  Lots of pretty good stuff (no pinhole though).  My favorite piece was an erased geological map of Wisconsin with a small display case next to it with the erasings from each county, each in a separate labeled compartment.

You get a pretty good view of downtown West Bend through that south window.  Looks like the weather is a little nicer for the drive home.

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

University Club

U-Club is a campus social group which meets monthly during the school year for drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and general commiserating and conspiring.

I only take photographs there occasionally, because there's the perpetual pinhole problem of not much of a place to put a tabletop tripod (much less a regular tripod) where it won't get bumped by the milling crowd, and I have an odd reluctance to be noticed doing it.

Occasionally both objections are manageable, and I take a few exposures.

The most recent meeting, I was one of the earlier arrivals and got a seat on a couch with the only coffee table in the room right in front of me.

I sat down next to Grace, a former big city journalist who followed her mathematician spouse to the outlands.  By sheer force of will, Grace developed a class which involves one big all-class project which my department would help stroke into print, web and video productions.  The University loves her because she get's at least half a page in the local newspaper and a few minutes on the Green Bay TV news every time she puts one of these out. (Grace would kill me if I didn't link to her latest project). Here's she's trying to corral Bill, a chemistry professor, into giving a presentation in one of her live happenings.  I'm trying to figure out how to explain to Bill that his head has been replaced by the lamp shade behind him. I got it – it's symbolizing how bright scientists are.  Yea, that's it.  Bill is also heavily involved in the Faculty Senate so possibly it represents the transparency of University governance.

When I went into the other room I ran into Allison, the University's new photography teacher, whom I'd already met last fall.  While we chatted about teaching photography and of course, me plugging pinhole, with the dining room table right in front of us, it seemed obvious to take a picture.  I didn't get a chance to ask Alison about her own work so I googled her and she's doing this fantastic project about "a place between reality and play", in which she appears in all the photographs.  I can relate to self-portraiture.  Allison has a really consistent conceptual framework and looks like very disciplined preparation.  I do self-portraiture because it's convenient.

Standing next to us were Jennifer, chair of the Chemistry Department, and Mary Ann, a faculty spouse who shepherds foreign exchange students, looking quite saintly haloed by the wall sconce with the camera looking up at her.  I wish I could say this was my idea, but it's often said that half the fun of pinhole photography is finding out what actually came through the pinhole. During the previous exposure, which took about 5 minutes,  Mary Ann mentioned that she had never been photographed with a pinhole camera.  It would be impolite to ignore a direct invitation like that. I warned her that sometimes odd things happen in pinhole portraiture.  The overexposed light coming through the hair on the back of her head somewhat modified her coiffure and reinforced the notion that she was glowing.  The overall composition of this picture was also a pleasant surprise, and brings out my latent didactic photo teacher.  Please discuss leading lines, framing, the rule of thirds and a high contrast center of interest.

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

Pinholiness–now on YouTube

I often worked with a very enthusiastic, but somewhat technically challenged, business professor to help him with using multimedia materials and several other aspects of his on-line course.  Don's a very sociable person and we often talked about our personal interests.  I had a collection of pinhole cameras on a table in the corner of my office, so that came up quite often.

He was a member of the Southwest Noon Rotary, which had a tradition of including some kind of educational talk at their monthly meeting, and Don was active in recruiting (mostly) faculty to give these presentations.  In 2007, he asked me to give a presentation on Pinhole Photography and it's appeal.

I occasionally have had the feeling when trying to explain why I do things in a particular way, such as my reluctance to crop images and printing pinhole negatives at their actual size (before I was seduced by the demon 35mm), that my justifications often sounded more like a religious argument than anything else, so I named the presentation Pinholiness. Since Don warned me that the meeting would begin with a prayer, I figured that might have some appeal.

I think the thesis that pinhole is not just a middle school science demo, but is a mature method of expression for photographers holds up pretty well almost a decade later.

I used one of the first voice recorders for an iPod to record the audio, and later synced it with the slides into a internet deliverable presentation with Adobe Presenter, a flash-based product.  It's been on my web site since then, but it's kind of an odd format, even for flash, and lately wouldn't play on some browsers, and of course, not on a lot of portable devices.  Also my web site is the only thing left on an old server that sooner (probably) than later the university is going to shut down.  Time to get it on another spot and covert it into a more modern, more accessible, format. Many thanks to Wayne (who you may remember as the guy who gave me the Scotch that led to the Glenmorangie Evil Cube) for his help converting it to this format.

So here it is on YouTube.  The presentation is a little over 25 minutes long and 32 minutes including the Q&A. It's embedded below.

A Populist for Minnesota

Recently on the League of Upper Midwest Pinholers Facebook page, Scott Stillman announced he would be giving a presentation on pinhole photography in anticipation of the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day celebration at a regular event at the Minneapolis Photo Center. At the end of the post, he wondered if anyone could loan him a Populist to demo for the crowd. Hmmm, could he be referring to me?

My first thought was "Hey, it's a camera anyone can make – build one."  But almost immediately reconsidered that Scott was a young guy who was probably pretty busy and has demonstrated his bona fides as a pinhole photographer adapting a lot of cameras to work without a lens.  Also, I hadn't built one in a long time, and then thought of a joke I could build into the camera.

Since this camera was going to Minnesota, I made it out of the carton from a 24 pack of Wisconsin beer, Leinenkugels of Chippewa Falls (famous for being where Annie Hall grew up).  I'm from Eau Claire about 10 miles to the south of Chippewa, and therefore drank Walters when I lived there, but they don't exist anymore, so I now consider Leinies my local beer, even though I now live on the other side of the state.  (Chief Oshkosh Brewery no longer exists either in case you were wondering.)

On the front I put the portrait of the Chippewa maiden that has been the symbol of Leinies since it was founded.  I think most young men who grow up in northwestern Wisconsin are probably secretly in love with her.

I had to do some tricky placement of the pattern to get the image aligned on both the camera front and the shutter.  She's on both the front and back of the carton, so it wasn't all that difficult.

On the back, of course, I had to put the map of the State of Wisconsin.

I did use tape from Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.

It's a completely stock Populist with none of the modifications I've done to The Populist, but that's appropriate to the purpose of the build.

I hand drilled the pinhole.  I probably should have used a Leinie's can, but I have a lot of brass shim stock around so I used that. I just used a common pin against a marble table top and sanded it with some 600 grit emery paper.

That's it on the left,  compared to a Gilder .2mm Electron Microscope Aperture on the right at the same magnification. It measures out to about .18 mm. A little small, but it looks pretty round and smooth, and exposures shouldn't be much different than for a .2mm. I've always used a .15mm Gilder aperture on The Populist, which is precisely 1 stop slower than a .2. Close enough for modern films.

While I was building it, I couldn't help but think of Gregg Kemp, in who's memory this year's Pinhole Day is dedicated. For the last few years Gregg was extremely bothered that so many people who submitted images to Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day just bought a pinhole lens cap for their Digital SLR and fired away on auto exposure. To him, the pinhole experience was more about crafting your own camera and experimenting with the medium than it was simply about the fact that no lens was involved. What struck me is this is all pretty easy to do adequately and with a little care can be done pretty well.  I'm not as concerned as Gregg was about this, but if you want to honor Gregg this Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, make a camera, or at least, drill your own pinhole. There are lots of other simple camera designs out there besides the Populist.

That having been said, there are a couple points I noticed while building this camera.

The clicker is unquestionably kind of tricky. It has to extend over the divider by just about 1mm and there's not much tolerance. If too high, it folds over, and while it still makes a click, it's a very quiet one. Luckily, it's pretty easy to try several times until you get a good loud click. In order to make it easier to place, it really helps to load the film, and with some kind of marker that's going to be visible on black tape, put a little mark through the sprocket hole. I'm lucky to be married to an artist with a vast collection of pens including a gold one that shows up really well, especially on 3M #235.

The second thing I noticed was that it's really helpful to get the slot in the winder wide enough, and long enough to really engage the tab inside the take-up reel.   The one on the left will feel a little like you're engaged with the tab, but if things are a little tight, it will slip and ride up on the tab and it takes a lot of force to keep the reel rotating.  The one on the right, although it's a little ugly, sits completely over the tab and stays engaged more reliably.

Having a craft knife like an X-Acto to cut the winder and shutter holes neatly and accurately is really worthwhile, rather than using scissors only method I included since I thought a craft knife might not be a common thing to have, and maybe dangerous with younger builders.

We often talk about the role of serendipity in pinhole, but Murphy's law is the flip side of that. Very early in the process of working on the Populist, I realized that the default print setting for a PDF file is fit to paper, which will often reduce the size of the image to the printable area of the printer, which can sometimes be very subtle.  I changed the default setting of the file to print at 100%, but I think some printers and PDF viewers don't recognize that. I put a 25mm bar on the diagram so you could check the size.

I knew I had some diagrams in a box in the basement, and just grabbed the one on top.  I remember actually noticing the 25mm bar, but didn't measure it. As I was making the camera, it did seem oddly small, but then I'm so used to The Populist which has several layers of tape on it. When I put the film cassette in it, I had to really jam it in there, and when the camera was closed, I could just barely advance the film, and it wouldn't rewind at all. I finally went down stairs and got one of the prototypes and what do you know, it was about 2 or 3 percent smaller than it was suppose to be, and I had to start over. Moral of the story: measure that calibration bar.

I've told Scott to give the camera away as a door prize, so if you're in the Twin Cites on April 5th, check out his talk and maybe get a hand made camera to use on Pinhole Day. If not, it's a camera anyone can make.

Roadtrip: Art in Milwaukee

The Milwaukee Art Museum has been closed for about a year for remodeling. They reopened last month so we thought it was time to check it out.

We had never been to the Haggerty Art Museum at Marquette University.  It's fairly small so we could fit a visit in before lunch.  It used to be pretty rare for photography to be allowed at all in most art museums but recently that seems to have changed.  They're usually pretty crowded with few places to sit a camera without it getting bothered during a long exposure, but we were the only ones in this gallery for most of the exposure and there was a nice ledge at just the right height.

And a bench just through that doorway.

In the middle of the Marquette campus is a 14th century chapel from France.  It was moved to Long Island in the 20's and then again here in the 60's when it was donated to Marquette.

It's called the Joan of Arc chapel because it contains a stone at which she once prayed that the architect brought from another French chapel when they reassembled it in America. Even at Marquette they're skeptical about that.

Then we walked a few blocks down Wisconsin Avenue to the Ambassador Hotel for lunch.  I wanted to go there because it was where I stayed when I played in the 1966 Wisconsin Catholic State Basketball Tournament. (It later changed to the Wisconsin Independent Schools but now everybody plays together in one tournament in Madison)  We came in third.  The place was full of girls from Racine. The next year coach put us in a motel way out in Wauwatosa.

We got there too late to have lunch in the dining room so we had to eat in the Lounge. (We didn't get to go in there in 1966.)  I had a Bloody Mary that came with a sausage stick, a stick of cheese, a pickle, a stalk of asparagus, a mushroom, a big green olive and a pearl onion in it.  Practically lunch by itself.

The entrance to the Milwaukee Art Museum is in a large hall with a 200 foot set of wings that open and close on top of it (it's a sunscreen they say).  The special exhibits gallery and museum store are between it and the rest of the galleries.  It's all connected by these long corridors.

They have several galleries dedicated to large contemporary paintings and sculpture. 

The Museum is right on the Lake.  We took a break for a beer in the little bar with it's walls of windows facing the lake.  This turned into a pretty nice sunset just after I finished this exposure, but we'd finished our drinks and went back to the art.

And, Sarah and I contemplating one of our favorites: a Mark Rothko painting.  I think a 6 x 9 foot print of this photograph would be a great addition to their collection.

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

More caffenol

I loaded the frozen roll of Tri-X into my Compact 120 6x9cm camera and gave development with Caffenol another shot.  Since I had pretty bad base fogging on the last roll, this time I used the Caffenol C-H recipe from The Caffenol Cookbook and Bible, recommended for use with faster films. The recipe calls for Potassium Bromide as a restrainer, but somewhere else on the internet I saw a note you could use plain old table salt, just ten times as much. The recipe calls for one gram of KBr so that's not as extreme as it sounds.

The base fogging was a little better.  Here is an old 35mm negative on top, compared to the previous roll on the left, and the new roll on the right.  It still looks like I have a ways to go.  I also think I may be fogging the film a little when I'm loading it.  Several negatives had what looked more like a light leak than overexposure. The next roll I'm going to try to load the camera in the changing bag to make darn sure that's not the problem.  And it is nearly 10 year old film, but it's been in the freezer the whole time.  If I still have a problem with the next roll, I think I'll have to buy a new roll of film to compare it to.

I did get a couple halfway decent shots, but nothing ready for exhibition yet.

I returned to the south kitchen window that had been a major subject when I was using black and white paper negatives.

And, when you can't come up with any other subject matter, a self portrait is always an option.