Erie

Reconstruction of the Erie railroad station, Salamanca, N.Y.

I made a quick trip to my home town over the weekend to see my folks. On a whim, I swung by the old Erie railroad station.

It's been sad to watch it fall to pieces over the last 40 years. I remember I actually took a train out of there when I was a kid. 

But the town faded after  the railroad left, and the furniture factory closed. The station just sits, open to delinquents and vandals. 

If it had been in another, more prosperous location, it would now be a quality restaurant, or a collection of boutiques or at least an antique mall. But like in so many communities, especially those in northern Appalachia, that won't happen.

What was I thinking!?

 

I couldn't even find my Squills. So here are my Tulips.I would like to apologize to any readers for visually misleading them yesterday and perhaps importing a sense of hope and Spring.

I feel like Charlie Brown who just had the football yanked away. 

This photo was taken today, 24 hours after yesterdays. That's life on the North Coast. Damn you, Lucy!

Perhaps an apt name for the Goddess of Cleveland weather.

Mentalist

Thanks to Mark Righmire for identifying this for me, a Siberian squill. it was the first color, other than the rhubarb, to push up through the mulch. It deserves a mention.

I've discovered over the last decade or two, that I really enjoy being outdoors more than in, especially in the summer which is preciously sweet along the North Coast. Or maybe that's just how I like to picture myself.

 It was a nice day, by Cleveland standards. It was a sunny, no-clouds, blue sky, 37-degree day. After work I took a moment to sit outside and consider the yard chores, a mental list, for the near future.

 I keep a modest garden, mostly Salsa fixins (when the deer don't ravage it), a little rhubarb, a few black raspberries, but that's about it. I want to expand it a tad and think about the layout, and why some things grow and others don't. and deal how to deal with the compost pile and a foolproof plan how to foil the deer (I'm envisioning Elmer Fudd here).

 I'm on the ropes with the very shady area in the back. It needs a major overhaul. I think I'll try one more time to grow some grass but after that, it's ground cover time. Perhaps a nice conifer.

 My outdoor lounge just needs to get cleaned up, the geegaws put back and maybe move a few plants. Oh, and run some electricity out there.

 I have a chain saw that won't start and a pile of hefty limbs accumulated after storms.

 I didn't write any of this down. Just by walking out the back door I know what needs to be done and have a good reckoning of the proper order.

 I wish the rest of life were that clear. But then again, maybe that would make it seem too much like chores.

Devotion

I stated  that this blog would not discuss Religion or Politics. So, with this entry, I skirt the issue.

While leaving an estate sale this morning I passed this yard (photo above). I didn't have my camera with me, but I went to my truck, and got my trusty Canon G9 to make the photo.

Simply said, I love personal, artistic, statements. Cutouts of people bending over do not count.

When I moved North from Alabama ten years ago, I re-discovered the world of lawn ornamentation.

In the South, it is called "Folk Art." In the North it is "Lawn Ornaments." But the difference I am skirting, is that in the North, the more personal statements are often based on the Catholic religion. Passion is good.

Most commonly, it is a tribute to the Mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mary. And the ones I see most commonly include a half-sunken bathtub surrounding the statue of Mary.

But this person went the extra yard. They constructed a box, with a real roof, and a front of plexiglass. This took some thought, and labor. It took love and devotion.

These tributes exist throughout our society, no matter what your beliefs are.

A couple of years ago I photographed the Virgin Mary statue in the back yard of my mother-in-law in Michigan. I made the photo with my 4x5 pinhole camera and later on decided to add color to it, via Photoshop.

My point is, if there is one, is that personal expression of your beliefs, on your property, is ART. Nothing more?

Thinking inside the box

About a year ago I started building pinhole cameras, experimenting with old cigar boxes.

My first camera is designed to accept a roll-film back made for Graflex-type cameras. That's still a work in progress, as I'm having trouble with the film back not working properly. More on that as it develops...

The next project I tackled (shown here) was with a different style cigar box. This one has a 55mm focal length and instead of using film, it takes photo paper about 5 x 7 inches in size. I drilled a 1-inch hole in the middle of the top of the box. The aperture is made with a thin piece of copper and has a diameter of .0135 inches. I made the hole with the smallest micro drill I had. I know that it should be a little smaller than that for the focal length, but it's a baseline for me to work from.

The shutter is cut from a piece of plastic, actually an old mud flap for a car, fastened with a simple machine screw and nut. Inside the camera, I put two slightly raised strips of plastic at each end of the bottom so the paper could be inserted under the lip to hold it in place.

Why I decided to test it on one of the colder days of winter I have no idea. I have an old changing bag I purchased at an estate sale so I could make multiple exposures in the field. I wasn't very picky about the location. I just wanted a good place to work. In this case I had an iron railing to brace the box against, and a bench to set the changing bag on.

So I would load a piece of paper in the bag, take it out of the bag, make the exposure, put it back in the bag, close it, take out the paper and put in a new sheet, repeat. Unfortunately, the paper I cut wasn't uniform so it wasn't always a tight fit.

I made exposures of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 seconds as a test. By the third exposure my fingers were so cold I couldn't feel which was the light-sensitive side of the paper. But I guessed correctly since they were all arranged facing the same way.

Back home, I set up a makeshift darkroom and processed the paper. It turned out that 2 to 4 seconds was about right for this overcast day. I expected it to be longer, but then again I had no idea of the real exposure value of the paper.

I picked the most properly exposed negative and made a contact print while it was still wet. The results were not great, but better than I expected. There is a bright spot toward one of the upper corners, caused by a hole in the top of the box that I had overlooked. There was either a little light leak in one corner, or it was caused by improper handling of the paper.

It's not a great photo, but it was terrific fun and a great learning experience. My ultimate goal is to be able to build reliable cameras that others can use, whether from found objects or built from scratch. Baby steps.

Cigar box prototype #2. 4 seconds on paper at Huntington Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks in Bay VIllage, OH.