from f295: That Toddlin' Town

F295 was an international discussion forum begun and administered by Tom Persinger. Originally just about pinhole photography, it expanded into all kinds of alternative methods.  It was active from 2004 until 2015 but it remains on-line. Recently it disappeared from the web for a few days, and that prompted me to decide to reprise some of my favorites here at Pinholica, for backup if no other reason. 

I was reminded of this by Andrew Bartram of the Lensless Podcast's plans to be more rigorous about documenting the experiences of the last six months of his copious hotel room stays. I had minimal need to spend nights away on business but it did happen and I can sympathise with his predicament and maybe provide some inspiration. Also, Andy and Kristin are planning to spend time in the second city next month. It was posted under the title "That toddlin' town" on April 15th, 2008.  

Long time f295 members may remember me complaining about being edited to death preparing the documents for our reaccreditation. We must have done all right because we got reaccreditted with no ifs, ands or buts and the Higher Learning Commission invited us to the conference this year to show off our materials and reassure those with upcoming reaccreditations that they could pull it off too.

The conference is held at the giganto-conference "luxury" Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago

After driving through every kind of precipitation available, we arrived kind of late. My room was on the 21st floor of the west tower (I told you it was a giganto hotel)

It's located right where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River. You know, where, in The Fugitive, Harrison Ford makes the phone call that allows Tommy Lee Jones to figure out where he is. I think Dogtakesphotos may have posted pictures of the Wrigley Building.

Here it is literally at dawn. I woke up at 5:30 and put the camera in the window again and kind of forgot about it, and it was light by the time I remembered.

As far as I could tell the difference between a luxury hotel and a regular one is an extravagant excess of pillows and you have to pay extra for things that are free in a regular hotel, like internet access and breakfast.

We got to the conference a little early and set up in the first row. It was funny how many others came in and set up further back. You'd think a bunch of educators, after bugging students for years to sit in the front would naturally gravitate to the front.

Breakfast was provided by the conference.

Didn't take too long for the action to get going pretty consistently for the three hours. Here I am probably answering the question "What would you do differently if you could do it again?" Just about everybody phrased it that way.

After the session, we met up with my colleague's daughter for lunch at the Bongo Room on Milwaukee Avenue. They couldn't seat us for forty-five minutes, so we went to a thrift store across the street.

While we were waiting, Mabel (the daughter) entertained us all by trying on "vintage" clothes. Unfortunately, I ran out of film so no shots of the Bongo Room.

All with the Populist, .15mm pinhole 24mm from 24x36mm frame.   
See also https://pinholica.blogspot.com/2018/08/from-f295-beantown-and-back-my-first.html

The Oshkosh Plein Air Festival

For the last two years, the Oshkosh Fine Arts Association has sponsored the Plein Air Festival. Artists paint or draw a work in Oshkosh over a four day period in the open air. This year they publicized several event venues where the artists would be clustered and the public could visit, watch them work and interact with them.

One of the things that has attracted me to pinhole cameras with small negatives is that the low resolution, grainy images they produce are reminiscent of painting. In case Alfred Steiglitz or Ansel Adams is reading this, I really don’t want to get into an argument. The photos from my little cameras are, I think, still distinctly photographic.

On Friday and Saturday the air was particularly plain and the big star high in the midsummer sky had free rein.

I thought my new Manic Expression Cube was particularly suited to capture this event. Despite the fact that it hadn’t been tested in full sun, I optimistically ventured forth to see what I could get. It turns out this camera can’t be trusted out in the brightest conditions and some of the exposures were fogged to some degree. I’ve never been one to give up on a negative. It turned out that the editing required to bring back these fogged frames produced images that had an abstracted quality. That seemed appropriate for this theme.

The venue on Friday was The Waters on the shore of Lake Winnebago. The rising front, which is the culprit in the questionable light-tightness of this camera, demonstrates it’s value in this first image.

There was one family with young children that was going from artist to artist. By the time I got the tripod set up, the older ones had run off with dad in pursuit and left just mom and baby to watch the painting.

As a photographer with just one angle of view available, I was a little surprised when I saw how narrow an angle this painter was rendering. I asked her about the opaque umbrella.  She said it did modify how the colors and detail of the painting appeared but admitted that a good deal of it’s value was just shading her from the heat of the sun.

The umbrellas were very popular but some chose to brave the deluge of photons.

A variety of media were eligible for the competition but this was the only person I saw working in pencil.

Although each day a particular venue was specified, they could paint anywhere in certain designated areas of the city. As I rode downtown, I encountered this fellow in the dappled light among the grand Victorian houses on Washington Avenue. The distorted colors and contrast caused by the fogged negative turned out to be serendipitously appropriate. There was a guy cutting up the sidewalk with a concrete saw just out of the frame.

Saturday’s location was the weekly Farmer’s Market on Main Street. I started at what turned out to be the most popular spot to paint, the intersection of Church and Main.

Exposures in the shade were five seconds and I was hoping I could record the artist looking back and forth from her subject to the painting. It appears she spent more time looking at the work than at the scene.

When I first heard about the location, I expected tables of colorful vegetables to be a common subject but no one I saw was facing the farmers.

I first walked south down Main Street and didn’t find any more participants in the festival. When I passed Jim Evan’s Art Haus, although it wasn’t associated with the festival at all, it seemed an appropriate subject.

When taking the previous picture, I was right next to a face painting booth. Works on flesh weren’t eligible for the festival, but she was painting in the open air.

Returning to the north end of the market I found the rest of the painters. As usual, I was surprised when asking people if I could take their photograph how unremarkable it seemed to them that I was doing it with a little cardboard box. I did speak to one or two about pinhole photography, most of which consisted of them asking if I was familiar with some other pinholer they knew. When this one heard me extending the tripod, he said “Oh, you have a real camera“ before he turned around to see what I had. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “I have a real camera.”

The painters themselves were generally ignored by the crowds around them but occasionally you would find someone pausing to study how they worked.

The pencil artist from the previous day was also being unusual by choosing this low angle of view.

I usually only take one exposure of a subject but decided to also get close up to this painter to capture the colors of his palette. I forgot to wind the film and got a double exposure, which is often considered artistic.

The Fine Arts Association had a booth with materials for the public to try their hand at painting but it was a hard sell with the passers by.

I really liked the way the sky and the reflection off the front of Roxy’s Supper Club highlighted this painter’s face.

Her image included a turret at the corner of Main and Park but everyone else I saw that morning was depicting the round Queen Anne turret of the 1895 Webster block back at Church and Main.

All with the Manic Expression Cube.  .17mm pinhole 24mm from 24x24mm frame on Kodak Colorplus 200.

from f295: Close up.

f295 was an international discussion forum begun and administered by Tom Persinger. Originally just about pinhole photography, it expanded into all kinds of alternative methods. It was active from 2004 until 2015 but it remains on-line. Recently it disappeared from the web for a few days, and that prompted me to decide to reprise some of my favorites here at Pinholica, for backup if no other reason. 

On reddit in response to the Manic Expression Cubed post aperfectdevil commented: "That's a fantastic close up for pinhole work!!!"  It reminded me of this post in reply to a query about this topic. Getting close is easy with pinhole. You just get closer. However motion is exaggerated because it occupies a greater angle of your picture so you have to be careful to find motionless objects, work inside, or have an extremely still atmosphere.  Titled "Close up", it was posted almost an even decade ago on July 13, 2009.

Scott Speck started a thread in the Camera Making section a while back "Can one build a powerful macro pinhole camera?" 1:1 magnification was mentioned, and really crisp details. Thought I'd see if the Populist was such a powerful device. I didn't measure whether all of these were 24mm from the subject, as usual, I just eyeballed it.

First up was Spenser who must have been particularly exhausted from his daily comprehensive survey of all moving biota in the back yard since he held stlll through most of the exposure. Usually sitting a camera this close to his nose results in a more active inspection.

As usual, I had to cook. Here's the pepper grinder.

Garlic goes into almost everything I cook.

I was cooking pasta with shrimp and green beans. These were 31-40 per pound shrimp, so fit the 24x36mm frame of the Populist quite well.

And close ups of flowers always have dramatic impact. The peonies on the dinner table.

And one last, a little softer than the rest because the Clematis was still on the plant and I had to put up with a little wind.

The Populist has .15mm pinhole 24mm from a 24x36mm frame

Manic Expression Cubed

I threatened to make a 24x24mm format camera with a rising front during the waning days of my fit of manic expression this spring. If the pinhole is also 24mm from the film (the diameter of a 35mm cassette) that makes it cubic, which is geometrically satisfying.

It’s the same template as my other 35mm Populists except with 12 millimeters cut out of the middle.

Several things motivated making this camera. It’s the same length/format ratio I’ve liked with the Evil Cube. I’ve been rather infatuated with the rising front in the last year and recall wishing it were an option when on the road with the 35mm Populists. I’ve gotten kind of a renewed fascination with the quality of 35mm pinhole. A square format also means you don't have to bother to turn the camera on the tripod. Working with the Oshkosh Public Museum's collection of early 20th century cameras,  I had noticed that some of the smallest vest-pocket folders, using 127 roll film, had rising fronts.

There’s a healthy dose of internet contrariness going on here as well. In the last month I’ve heard 35mm pinhole described as a joke in a reply to someone who was inquiring how to do it. Another assessment characterized it as a source of terror because you might be faced with too many pictures, particularly with a “36” exposure roll, which might require Sisyphean labors to process and edit. There was also a remark that such a wealth of frames could lead to the kind of indiscrimate variations digital photographers are so often accused of.

If this camera were to be proportional to the Evil Cube, the difference between the rising and axial pinhole would be under five millimeters. (The Evil Cube is over twice as big and has 10mm between axial and rising pinhole.) My cardboard, glue and Xacto knife construction methods are limited in accuracy. With them that close together, could I make a shutter precisely enough that one pinhole was covered when the other was opened?

When I started this rising pinhole business, it made my head hurt to think about a pinhole that actually moved up and down. Then I realized that this winter I had made a shutter that rotated 360 degrees! It shouldn’t be that hard to make an actual rising front.

I ended up giving it 10mm of rise from the axial position. Mr. Pinhole says the image area is 46mm in diameter at this distance so the vignetting shouldn’t be too bad at full rise.

The problem with that moving shutter is keeping it light-tight. There is no real light seal between the sliding shutter and the camera body. The sliding part of the shutter just presses up against the front of the camera. I overestimated how light-tight that would be. You could see the sun shining through the gap.

I added a few parts to reduce the vulnerable area to a minimum and to keep the slider under positive pressure against the front and that seems to have worked. The negatives show no evidence of light leaks. However, it had rained for a week and any sunny day was spent working in the garden. I did leave it out all day under a fairly bright cloudy sky.

If the pinhole is going up and down, you have to know where it is when you’re looking at it from the back. The actual sliding part extends the width of the camera and has beaded pins to indicate where the pinhole is.

Since there are 8 clicks for a 36mm wide frame and there is no whole number solution of 24/36 X 8, it will have to be 6 clicks per frame. Only thirty percent more pictures per roll of film. I’ll bet half the time I advanced the eight clicks per picture anyway out of habit.

I put the clicker on the supply side to see if that would be less touchy. It’s not.

It has a hand drilled .17mm pinhole.

Of course, the main use of a rising front is to keep your verticals parallel in a scene where otherwise you would be tilting the camera up.

A tilted camera is not so noticeable with something odd-shaped like a tree but it's nice to have the buildings near the ground not looking like they're leaning backward. This one is at the maximum rise. There was some vignetting near the top but with a lot of pictures, that helps control an overexposed sky.

Occasionally out on the road, I end up supporting the camera on a water glass or something and can't tilt it up, yet I want a higher point of view.  Here again, that maximum rise.

Sometimes the shift of that rising front can be handy even when you're not pointed up. I wanted to look straight down on my ugly feet without getting the desktop tripod legs in the shot.

On one of those rainy days, there was a spell of a light drizzle and the pinholer's dream of absolutely no wind, so I was tempted into the garden.

It doesn't take much breeze to make a fern flutter.

Peonies waiting to pop at the end of some long stalks. For those of you who are concerned that 35mm film isn't big enough for pinhole, this is a crop of about two-thirds of the frame.

The weigela blossoms didn't wait for the rain to stop.

And a particularly trembly subject as close as I could get to it.

All these were with Kodak Gold 200.

An ignored roll in the Evil Cube

I mentioned in previous post that I had loaded the Evil Cube in early December but never quite got around to taking photographs with it. I don't really know why, this camera was one of my favorites last year. It's not like it was hidden in a drawer - it was mounted on a tripod next to the piano for the most of winter.

I finally used it during a snow storm in February.

Immediately after this, I made virtually the same exposure with a 35mm Populist which started a three post manic fit. On close inspection you could tell which camera made which image but it's not immediately obvious.

During the winter bleakness, this flowering primrose was a welcome spot of color.

Sometime in March, I took it on a bike ride to catch the surf on Lake Winnebago.

It came with me to Massachussets to get a portrait of the new homeowners. The yard slopes down to the street so the rising pinhole was necessary to get the framing I wanted.

The back of the house also needed the rising pinhole to keep the fenestration rectilinear. I love the blue reflections in the tops of the upstairs windows.

On Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, before Sarah finished this roll, I did one insurance shot with this camera, lest something go amiss with the film in the camera I was using. It was my second favorite Pinhole Day photo.

The Evil Cube has a .3mm pinhole 6cm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Lomography 100.