From f295: We always go to Boston on Indigenous Peoples' Day.

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'm having more trouble than I'd like with my latest camera project and we're going to Boston in a few weeks. This travelogue from f295 seems appropriate to fill in. Indigenous Peoples' Day (well, not everyone calls it that) is a holiday in Massachusets. Because Andy hasn't always had a lot of paid vacation, we would always go when he was already getting time off. Kristin is a school teacher. Days off during term can be complicated so we have continued this tradition. Here are two posts of the last October trip we made before f295 ceased taking submissions.

Andy and Kristin had been together less than a year. They took us to Cambridge to the location of their first date. Posted under the title: "Museum of Science, Boston" posted on October 23rd, 2014

On a gloomy rainy day, went to the Museum of Science Boston.

It stretches right across the Charles.

Went to the "lightning show" with the four story Van de Graf generator.

During the big finale.

And while we're geeking out, the total lunar eclipse from earlier this month, setting in the west. Seemed like a particularly dark eclipse to me at the time, and assuming the response of the film to be the same, darker than the one in April. (Total rain out of the partial solar eclipse at sunset tonight in eastern Wisconsin. Hope you had better luck)

A second post about the following day was titled "Boston Seaport Redux" and was posted November 7, 2014.

We kind of reproduced a day in the Seaport area of Boston that we had spent two years ago. Slightly different group though,

Started at the Institute for Contemporary Art. We saw Ragnar Kjartansson's "The Visitors." An hour long nine-screen video installation with a different musician on eight screens and an exterior porch full of people on the ninth performing a folkish bluesy four line verse that continuously repeated with an occasional bridge. It was oddly compelling and inspiring.

They have this room-sized partially glass-walled elevator. This is the entire ride from the fourth floor galleries back down to the lobby.

Andy took us to the gift shop to show us an architecture book which had a picture of a house in Appleton about 20 miles away from ours.

We then proceeded to the Harpoon Brewery, not for the tour this time, but to experience their new Beer Hall. It is the only place in the world you can get their classic IPA, ya know. Andy and Sarah got a glass of that along with some ginormous pretzels with fancy dips.

Kristin and I had a flight, me of classics, she of more exotic varieties (Coconut Porter?!)

For a little while anyway.

Then back to Andy's apartment in West Roxbury. (He's moving next month to a place in Quincy, his 12th residence in 14 years, which has a spare bedroom the parents can stay in! We'll probably have to share it with Jeremy though.)

For the second time ever, Andy made us dinner at his house. Pork en croute with apricot stuffing. Very delicious.

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

Wide summer color

It’s been fun diving into the popular world of ultra-wide pinhole.  It occurred to me that except for two frames from the Reimagined Interiors post at 20mm on the 6x6 Variable Cuboid and one frame with the 6x9 Variable Cuboid at 35mm, I hadn’t done any of it in color. Another opportunity for the Wisconsin Amber Wide Angle.

When you’re out looking for something to photograph with color film, it’s hard to pass up sailboats. Several families who had been using these watched me from just out of the frame to the left. Anybody else think it’s weird that they’re using practically process cyan, magenta and yellow?

A few yards to the right, several similarly colorful canoes were being stored.

It was pretty obvious to follow up with these when I passed the University’s Student Recreation Center a few miles further on up the Fox.

My good friend Gene just shared this meme on Facebook. Little did he know.

They’ve left me alone with the vegetables again. We planted four different kinds of tomato this year. Here are the largest and smallest.

Actually what got me going was remembering an internet conversation awhile ago where someone mentioned that the problem with closeups using ultra-wide angle cameras was that it was hard to keep the camera from blocking the light. You may have read me complaining that to manage the vignetting inherent in really short cameras you have to find scenes with a dark center and bright edges. What better way than to shade the subject with the camera?

But now that I’ve started, I couldn’t pass up this sunbeam that presented itself.

After years of seeing cyan as a color cast to be adjusted out, it’s kind of shocking to use a cyan tablecloth for a backdrop. It seems I’ve inadvertently done something right. From Canva.com’s definition of cyan:

 Cyan combines well with its complement, red. You can also pair it with yellow and magenta—two other colors in the subtractive color model. Both of these combinations are bold and modern.

Occasionally we have to share with unspecified creatures and those tomatoes go in a special bowl covered with plastic wrap because the exposed interiors where the shared parts have been removed attracts fruit flies.

In addition to the cherry tomatoes, which I’m currently roasting to put on pasta, we have a dark heirloom variety, a large heirloom and some regular Early Girls, which are ripening much later than the heirlooms.

These heirlooms need to be kept under close watch because, in addition to being sought after by the critters, the have a tendency to crack open before they’re completely ripe.

When I took my Takara Standard road bike in for a cable adjustment and general lube job, I noticed that they listed it on the ticket as a “red road bike.” Does this look like red to you? I just noticed that when they put the bull horn handle bars on, the untaped parts are anodized to sort of match this color.  When I bought it in 1975 with Gerry Ford’s economic stimulus check, which we got for putting up with Nixon and Vietnam (does that sound familiar?), the color was listed as brown.

Getting dinner ready with the hazy sun shining into the pantry. (Corn on the cob and tomato soup.)

I just bought a new computer for my 72nd birthday so I could retouch photographs and do other blog work without going down to the basement to use my moniterless 2012 laptop with a Visio TV driven by the external moniter jack. I shouldn’t complain. I doubt if most people have such a dramatic stairway to go down to their basement.

The Wisconsin Amber Wide Angle Populist has a .22mm pinhole 24mm from a 6x6cm frame. The film is Ektar 100.

Another try with a Little Guinness

 

The first camera I made to try out the self-adhesive labels and double sided adhesive sheets was this Little Guinness 35mm Populist. With just a single layer of the template in the back, the white Guinness logo passed enough light to be imprinted on almost every negative. I added a layer of backing paper from 120 film to the back, and to my great surprise, I still got light leaks on some of the negatives.

It only happened when the camera was in the sun for a long time and doesn’t match the design on the packaging. I thought the front of the camera was sufficiently light proofed by the tape holding the pinhole on, but there may be a small gap. The entire interior is going to get a layer of 3M#235 Opaque Photographic tape before it gets another roll of film.

But it did take a pretty extreme exposure to cause the light leak so I did get a few images. It is kind of a nice pinhole - hand drilled, .17mm.

We went to Olbrich Gardens in Madison. They have lots of exotic flowers.

An exotic potted plant on a brick courtyard double exposed on a hen and chicks.

Andy and Kristin came for a visit. I set the camera up when were having breakfast in the dining room. Andy is completely obscured by my figure and Kristin is totally cropped off at the left!

I did a better job when we went to lunch at Beckets, on the Fox River where we could watch the drawbridge.

Another day we went to lunch at the Fox River Brewing Company which has outdoor seating on the Fox.

It’s also right next to another drawbridge. This was the middle of the week so not much boat traffic, so neither drawbridge went up while we were watching.

The main disadvantage to the outdoor seating at Fox River Brewing is you have to get your beer in plastic glasses.

We went to see the Paine Gardens nearby.

Kaleidoscopes pointed at potted plants are a popular feature in public gardens. The kaleidoscope was invented by Sir David Brewster, who was also the first person to mention that he had taken a photograph with a pinhole. This is with the pinhole held up to the eyepiece of the kaleidoscope. 

A low angled view of a stone globe decorating the paths through the gardens.

The new formal garden.

While we were there a rather large and elaborate wedding ceremony was in it’s early stages despite it being Thursday afternoon. A team of three professional photographers were taking close-ups of the bouquets. They eyed me quizzically while I wrapped the little Joby tripod around an arbor, but they kept working on the flowers.

Little Guinness has a .17mm pinhole 24mm from a 24x36mm frame. Kodacolor 200.

Another 120 Populist at 45mm

 

The first 6x6cm format camera I made was the Glenlivet Vertical Populist. It was 45mm from pinhole to film because of the dimensions of the box it was made out of. When I started working on making a new template for the 10th Anniversary Populist, my first experiment was a 6x6cm camera at 45mm. I just cut down a template for a 6x9cm 60mm camera, altered the sides and added the flaps. For the original blog post about making the 10th Anniversary Populist design, I made two cameras out of Cheerios boxes to photograph for the how-to directions, a 60mm and a 45mm. I’ve since lost the 45. I also made a 45mm Populist out of a MacAllen Scotch box for my son about this time. As a result of a terms-of-service misunderstanding I lost the pictures from the how-to blog post when the University deleted my account and I built another 45 for a new set of pictures. The first photograph done with that camera ended up in a juried art show and they wanted to display the camera along with the picture. When someone bought the picture, I included the camera with it. Pondering my next project with self-adhesive labels and two sided adhesive sheets, a 45mm Populist seemed like a logical choice.

 My original plan was to make one without any modifications to see how long it took but that’s no fun. This one does have some unique features. When I first put a second risen pinhole on the Evil Cube, I mentioned that you could use the double shutter on any of the 120 Populists, but I had never done it. It turns out the shutter template for the Evil Cube sticks out a bit above the top of a Populist, but there’s enough extra there that you can trim it off. In that last camera, I had made a shade for the pinhole so it could point more toward the sun without creating reflections off the edge of the pinhole. This new one lets me point to within 45 degrees of the sun with the pinhole in the shade. I’d never made a double shade before either.

There is one odd thing about the pinholes. When trying to drill a matched set of optimally diffracted .28mm holes, I came up with very nice looking ones at .24mm and at .26mm. I called it good and averaged them to determine f at 180. The larger one went on top because it might compensate a little for vignetting. There didn’t seem to be any unusual deviation in the exposures beyond what I usually get.

 The WinderMinder normally goes over the viewfinder on top the camera. I built it up both on the camera top and the WinderMinder for a nice straight line to sight down.

One thing you can’t see is that it’s light-proofed by covering the inside of the back with the backing paper from T-Max 100. The adhesive sheets make this sort of thing quick and easy.

The blue beads for the side finders were chosen because they were all that was left that wasn’t kind of dayglo in the assorted packs I’ve been getting white and black beads out of.

The templates for these projects were printed by DPI Printing, a local digital press. Normally I drop off a project and pick it up the next day, but these adhesive labels were run on a machine in the lobby and were ready right away. I hadn’t brought a backpack and asked for some chipboard sheets to protect them when strapped to the bicycle rack. This camera is made out of those two sheets. I had to take a picture of their shop with it. Of course I started with the rising front pinhole. One of the tripod legs wasn’t completely locked and when I went to close the shutter it moved and got a bit of second exposure for a dynamic effect.

Read Elementary is the oldest operating school in Oshkosh. Perennially in danger of closing, it was rescued by a referendum last fall.

I’ve photographed this display of shiny windows before, but in cold, cloudy and windy conditions.

The previous exposure on that roll of film, on that dark, cold day was this arrangement of fire escapes. It wasn’t necessary to sit through long exposures this time but for both of these had to wait for a cloud to get out the way of the sun.

Next, the axial pinhole. Water lilies on Lake Butte des Mortes.

They’ve been repairing sidewalks, curbs and driveways all around us this summer. This is the junction between the arm and the body of a small digger they left down the block.

Andy playing my Alvarez acoustic which I had played in anti-war rallies through a bull horn. He had a terrible teacher for American History in high school. To freak him out, when they studied the Vietnam War, he took it for a class report and played “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” Here he’s playing the riff from Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh, Well,” from about the same era. 

He’s had a wide angle camera pointed right in his face since seconds after his birth so he’s well habituated to being photographed and is a pinhole practitioner himself. He makes the internet for the New England Historic Geneological Society and is the webmaster for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (He volunteered without telling me). He plays lead guitar for Alternate Weekends.

The film is T-Max 100 semi-stand developed in Rodinal 1:100.