You are invited...

to my first solo show - held starting this week at the Fort Gallery in Fort Langley. The opening reception is this Friday, July 18th, from 7-10 pm. Hope to see you there!

Not exactly pinhole...

Apologies for these - but long-length telephoto / wildlife shots & pinhole just don't mix! These shots are from the Yukon Wildlife Preserve, which I was very fortunate to visit recently while on a business trip to Whitehorse.

Enjoy!

Yukon Wildlife Preserve

612 Juice Box Camera

This camera was one of those "spur of the moment" cams - and one I decided I would make from only what I had in the kitchen/recycle bin at the time.



The camera is made from three 1 liter juice boxes of the TetraPak variety. The winding mechanism is based on a pencil stub with a empty, flattened eraser holder. The winder is held in place with bread bag clips, and there are washers of TetraPak material on both sides of the box to make it light-tight. The spools ride on decapitated push pins pressed into 2L pop bottle caps - (full height on the one side, trimmed flat on the other) giving a perfect size for the native box dimensions.

The finished camera is held together with elastic bands, plus a swath of hockey tape around the whole seam for light proofing. Don't expect a tight wrap on the film - you'll need to unload in the dark or in a changing bag. The flexibility of the box material also can be a pain when trying to hold the camera still - I eventually made a wooden base plate with a tripod mount in it to overcome this design limitation. The plate is just banded on with the elastics.

If you want try making one of these feel free to ask for more details with a comment.



The camera owes a nod to Nick Dvoracek's Populist Camera. I recommend Nick's site - it has some good articles he's written on pinhole photography. You can often find Nick hanging around at f295 as well.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding: here's a test shot from the Trinity Western Campus (down at "Trinity Lake"). I've cropped the ragged edges and added a frame in Adobe CS2.

Happy WPPD!

Here's my wishes in the waning hours of WPPD that everyone had the opportunity to continue their quest for personal pinholiness today!

Workshop Camera

Here's some pictures of the 6x6 wooden camera we built during the workshop. This is a new design, based on some ideas gleaned from f295 over the years, plus my own ideas.



The camera is a wood / ABS hybrid. The main feature is the drop-in winding mechanism. Loading is achieved by flexing the ABS on the bottom. Once loaded, the cassette drops into the body.

In the future I think I'll try this design on other formats (612, 618, etc).

Pinhole Photography Workshop

I will be offering a two-part pinhole workshop through the Fort Gallery later this month - details below!

Sample pics from the 617 camera

Here at last are some sample pictures from the 617 camera up for sale on ebay right now. I finally figured out how to make a scanner I have access to scan 6x9 from 120 film. These images are three scans pasted together in photoshop to cover the full 17 cm negative. I didn't always get the levels exactly right between the three scans. Any artifacts you see (like the overexposed center of the train tacks picture) are just differences in levels and not artifacts on the negs. These exposures were in the 10-20 second range, depending on the light. The film used was Agfa APX 100.

In the above picture, the power poles truly are leaning outwards - that's not distortion. I find if the camera is kept level you can't even tell it has a curved plane.

You can see pics of the camera itself in the post below.