Pinhole and Pixel

I was able to get out last Monday to take some pinhole photos, one of which is my contribution to the 2011 Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

It was a very overcast morning, threatening rain, and I only had about an hour to make some photos. I was in Salamanca, N.Y., my hometown, to visit family. I went out Sunday morning to scout locations, but it started to rain, hard, and I had other things to do.

So I went back Monday morning (which happened to be my birthday) and made some photos. The exposures were made with my 4x5 pinhole camera. The subject was the long-abandoned Erie railroad station. Oddly, as I scouted the area a train came by, only about 20 cars, and the engineer blew his horn and waved. Just like when I was a kid.

I made my photos and drew my Canon G9 to take some Reconstructions. That’s what I call them … taking a series of images and then putting them back together.

I know, first I say I love the simplicity of pinhole photos and then follow it up with an image that is made up of more than 70 individual images. Yin/Yang. I’m a complicated guy.

So, here they are, my selected pinhole photo that I uploaded to the WWPPD web site, and my Reconstruction. I hope both will be appreciated, or commented upon, and at best, purchased in the form of a print.

Happy Birthday to me.
 

f256 and be there

For the past six years I've been immersing myself in the world of pinhole photography. I like the "old school" technique, the fact that it really makes you think about what you are doing. And then there’s the simplicity of it.

It's all about composition and exposure time. Not much else. No focusing, no aperture selection. It's analog at its best.

I've made a few cameras and converted a few others - with mixed success. But I have rarely seen a pinhole photo made with a digital camera that's worth its silver, or pixel, I should say. Usually they’re taken with some sort of body cap converted to a pinhole. I tried my hand at making one myself the other day, thinking that the ones commercially available had too large an aperture. So I made a cap with approximately an f256 opening. And guess what? Things still look lousy.

The nature of pinhole photography, some say the beauty, is in the dream-like, fuzzy images. I don't buy that personally. I at least want to know what I'm looking at.

And so the journey continues. In fact, it continues next week. This Sunday, also known as Easter, is the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. This is the 10th anniversary of the event, always held the last Sunday in April. Due to it also being Easter, the organizers have extended the event from April 23 to May 1.

In a nutshell, you make some pinhole photos and select one, just one, and upload it to their site so it can be posted in a gallery. That's it, no prizes, no commendations, just pure photography. Last year, 3,449 images were presented, from all over the world.

So if you're a photographer, and even if you're not, just do it. Get out and make some pictures. Go Old School with me.

I've been participating since 2007. Here was my submission for that year.

2007 - Burgers On The Grill

Seeing the elephant

This week marks the start of the Sesquicentennial of our American Civil War. Prepare to be inundated, over the next four years, with stories, films, news articles and the like. I've always been a student of the Civil War, at least back to my childhood. I'm sure I have read hundreds of books on the topic, and related areas, and have a modest library of my favorite titles and a small collection of vintage photographs.

Halloween, 1962.Oddly, I can pinpoint the moment I got hooked. It was on a family vacation in the summer of 1962. We had stopped at the Manassas visitor’s center. We probably stopped so that my sister and I could stretch our legs, but I think my folks knew I had some interest. My sister and I started walking around and strayed a little bit up a hill. As we came up over the crest we were confronted with a long, solid row of Confederate soldiers advancing up the hill towards us.

As it turns out, it was members of the Virginia National Guard, in full rebel uniform, practicing for the upcoming Centennial reenactment of the second battle of Manassas. I became an official buff then and there.

Flash ahead 15 or so years to where I'm working in Jackson, Mississippi and met another fellow traveler, Bob Zeller, who shared my enthusiasm for the subject. Aside from being regular visitors to Vicksburg, we found the time to "invent" a Civil War board game based on the Battle of Antietam, my friend’s favorite battle. He built the map, I made the markers and together we hashed out the rules. Over the next few years, both of us had moved to different states, so we played the game by mail. Yes, snail mail. We haven’t played in 30 years, but still have it.

I even managed to work in a visit to Charleston, S.C. and the Bentonville battlefield in N.C. on my honeymoon. I implore that if you ever meet my wife, do not bring up the subject.

I learned that both my grandfather and his brother served in 64th N.Y. Vols. My great uncle died of wounds received at the battle of Fredericksburg.

My friend, Bob, went on to found the Center for Civil War Photography, and is a leading expert on Civil War stereo views, the original 3D. Recently, he asked my help, and others, in researching and restoring photos in the Library of Congress to be used in a new documentary for television (it aired this week on the National Geographic channel). It was work, but it was also fun and a learning experience.

But I can't help but temper my enthusiasm of the Civil War’s Sesquicentennial with a little doubt and fear about how the war will be interpreted this time around. There is much opportunity, given its peculiar set of circumstances and events, for the usual over-dramatization, misinformation, shoddy research and commercialization. I hope that’s not what happens. It's important to know where we have come from as a country.
One of my favorite, recent, Civil War images. This is the Battleifield of Antietam, taken early one morning from the deck of my friends place on Red Hill. 

Contests and Grants and Fellowships, Oh, My!

Over the years I have watched many of them judged and I have to say, it's hit or miss at best. So much seems to be determined by the judges' moods or maybe what they had for breakfast or lunch. It's a crapshoot.

With that said, it's still nice to get an award. I have a folder full of certificates for first, second, and third places and honorable mentions for my photography and editing when I was in the newspaper business. I have a plaque for hosting a conference. I have two trophies that I cherish: One for being the offensive coordinator of my son's 7th grade football team in Alabama, and another for being an assistant coach for my daughter's 7th grade recreational softball team. The football team won one game. The girls won the championship. It doesn't matter.

And I have three, yes, three trophies for winning the fantasy football league that I have been the Commissioner of for 22 years. "In Your Face," I say to other BFL owners who probably will never read this.

But I have never received a Blue Ribbon, until this week.  I got one for winning "Best in Show" at the local pinhole photography competition sponsored by the Dunham Tavern Museum in Cleveland (see the photo below). 

OK, It wasn't a national contest, or a regional, or a state. And very few people in the area probably even knew about it. At best, there were maybe five entries in the adult category. My biz partner, Al, and I went to see the show on Monday. But the barn housing the show wasn't open and the docent on duty didn't have the key. And it was pouring rain. So we went back this afternoon.

I kind of associate Blue Ribbons with livestock competitions. That's all right with me. I know the endless, thankless hours required to raise a Blue Ribbon steer, or cow, or pig, or chicken.

But it's a resume builder, and I'm doing a Happy Dance.
Pinhole photo of the abandoned U.S. Coast Guard station at the mouth of the Cuyahoga river. This was my entry, 

Meriwether and me

I try to keep at least one book going at all times. But I'm a slow reader, mostly confining my time to late night. I get a chapter or two in and I'm done. For the most part, I read non-fiction, history, leaning toward the American Civil War.

But one of the books I've been working on is The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto. The other day I came across the passage below. 

When I read it, it made me feel worthless and at the same time, inspired. What he accomplished, at age 30, is unmatched by todays standards (as a sidebar, Meriwether Lewis committed suicide, arguably, at age 35 in a tavern at Grinder's Stand along the Natchez Trace in Mississippi).

From near the Continental Divide. Sunday, August 18th, 1805.

"This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world.
 
I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation.
 
I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."