fun with a pinhole camera

we had a two-day course over the weekend in creagive - it was with  photographer/journalist lars bertelsen and he was wonderful and inspiring! he taught us to make a pinhole camera using empty shoe boxes. we then learned to develop the photos in the darkroom. it is downright addictive and i'm thinking about which room could be transformed into a darkroom. 

the second morning of the course, i had my shoebox camera loaded and i stopped along my usual route along bækgårdsvej, where i knew that the single tree would have the kind of contrast the pinhole camera craves. i set it on the hood of my car. a bit more of that ended up in the picture than i had hoped, but it also gives it a vibe.

 

the weekend was cloudy, but that helped us learn a lot about light. light is super important with a pinhole camera and our results may have been better, had the sun been shining. but the fact it was cloudy also gave our photos a moody appeal. i  wandered down to the church, looking for shapes and contrasts. 

after the first one, i went back, looking for an angle that had some texture. i love how the cobblestones turned out against the church. i'll have to make a small video, as the church bells were ringing and i recorded them, thinking it would be the perfect accompaniment.  

lastly, we paired up to do a selfie. in this one, a 3-minute exposure, i turned my head after one minute and two minutes. i can tell you that standing still for a camera for three minutes feel like an absolute eternity. 

i have to take some photos of my shoebox camera and then i'll tell you more about the process. 

the beginning of a new photo obsession

i asked my friend bill to give me some photo assignments to do to get me through this interminable wait. we've had some very grey, dark days and i haven't really felt too inspired, but today, i decided that despite the grey fogginess of the day, i'd tackle one of them. the assignment was: reflections. the indirect reflection of someone or some thing. the actual person or thing can't be in the pic.

this fits very well with the theme of our local creative group's spring exhibition, so i cleaned up an old ikea mirror that we had hanging in our bathroom at the old house and i went outside. here are the results:

and one of myself, because i couldn't resist.

i liked the assignment. i'm less fond of the fir tree than i expected to be - the fine, black, bare branches against the grey sky just work better. i like the brightness of the mirror, tho' i'd like to have had some cool gold-framed oval-shaped one. there's something about the blue and green mosaic mirrored edge and the way it blurred out with my 50mm fixed lens that i just like. it gives a life and color to the photo that would have been absent. i spotted another location when i picked up sabin from school and i suspect i'll be loading that mirror into the car and carrying it around with me. that won't look way sillier than lying on the ground, photographing minifigures, now will it?

totally meta - me taking photos of lego me taking photos

these were inspired by andrew whyte's project. tho' i used my real camera, not my iPhone. aside: do you think there will come a time (soon) when we don't make a distinction between our real cameras and our phones? this isn't my official mini me, it's one i assembled myself <gasp> from minifigs we had around, plus the camera that loststar kindly sent to me. not sure why i chose red. i really don't have that many clothes that are red. but the girl scientist's head works very nicely (she's from series 11 if you're keeping track), and the hair is the right length, tho' i never part my hair in the middle, so it's not entirely accurate.

photo app fun continued or get thee to the app store

this is the same photo as yesterday, run through the tiny planet app.  after that, i got a little obsessed. but it was way fun!

swans on our lake.

the lighthouse at blåvandshuk

husband at the north sea

an old german bunker on the west coast of denmark

amber hunter at the north sea - i LOVE the birds in flight.

and here it is flipped the other way in the app. even cooler, don't you think?

a watch tower at sunset on the west coast.

and the same photo played with in the diptic app.

get thee to the app store, i tell you. 

iPhones are a very good thing. 

i wonder if other phones actually still exist?

photo app fun

it's been awhile since i got all excited photographically-speaking, but i just had to share a new app that kristina (who is ALWAYS ahead of the curve on the cool stuff (she was on pinterest before pinterest was all the rage)) turned me on to.  it's called montage. it lets you cut out shapes and layer your photos. it's not entirely intuitive, but it's usable once you get the hang of it.

to do this photo, i used no less than 4 apps - i took and treated the original photo in vintage camera. then i loaded it into montage, along with another photo from a week or so ago - and clipped that photo into a circle. i played with it a bit to get it sized and placed as i wanted it. then i cropped it in photogene and uploaded it all to instagram. a little bit the long route, but worth the fun.  funny, how my old favorite - hipstamatic, isn't even on the radar anymore.  i do still occasionally use camera+.

it's good i discovered this, as my month of iPhone photos only was wearing a bit thin. it's been good for my photo mojo, as i'm ready to go back to the big girl camera come february 1.

what are your favorite photo apps?

really expired film

take some really expired (in 1991) kodak ektachrome 120 film you found in a flea market, put it in a fabulous old rolleiflex TLR camera, go to the west coast of denmark, take a few shots. forget about it for about a year. go to berlin, take a few more shots. wind it up. send it for processing. and voila...

sabin on top of an old german bunker at blåvandshuk - the westernmost point of denmark

some rather eerie statues standing near esbjerg in denmark

the lighthouse at blåvandshuk

inside the main train station in berlin

the brandenburg gate

street scene - berlin

i'm digging on the overexposed, groovy old-fashioned look the expired film gave these. unlike some of my other cross-processed rolls, there's no red cast here. interesting how that works. i'm really falling in love with film. and would be learning more if i could remember the settings i used on these photos...

and we're back

new york city burning

after a long summer hiatus, kristina and i are back on across ø/öresund, sharing creativity across the sound separating denmark and sweden. we'll be posting highlights from the first roll from our summer film swap. i exposed a roll of expired slide film (oops, those pretenses again) in south dakota (or should i say sabin took most of the photos one evening when we had a bonfire) and then sent the roll to kristina in new york city. then kristina got it cross processed and here is the first of the results.

while of course the entire roll doesn't turn out as well as you might hope, there are some very cool and unexpected effects. kristina's camera rolled the film differently, so not only are they double exposures, but also half frames on top of my originals. i think it's especially effective on this shot of city streets.

be sure to stop by across ø/öresund in the next few days to see more. and do check out the interviews we did of one another. kristina's interview of me and mine of her.

we've got more fun planned over there, so keep checking it out. we'll definitely be getting up to photo fun at blog camp berlin in 10 days.

cameras have to earn their keep

i already showed this camera on flickr, but i realized i hadn't really written about it. i got it in an awesome little antique mall in tea, south dakota on our holiday. it's so cute with its brown bakelite body, i just couldn't resist it. and that flash, how cool is that? plus, it was only $12 and a couple of days later i saw the exact same one in worse shape for $53 in another antique mall, so it was also a steal. (either that or antique prices are totally arbitrary, which is undoubtedly the subject of another post.)

i have recently instituted a policy that all of the cameras around here need to earn their keep, so i began to scour eBay for some 127 film, which they stopped making in the mid-90s and which hardly anywhere processes anymore (i found a shop in CPH, don't worry). i decided it would be worth it to try it out. and although i loathe eBay for being incredibly amero-centric, i located, bid, sweated, bid some more, and finally won several rolls and they have arrived (i hereby thank the people of wisconsin for hoarding old film in their drawers).

the oldest ones expired in 1949 and the rest are from various dates in the 1960s. and i can't wait to try them out! this is going to be so much fun.

the first camera to have to earn its keep was my 1938 argus AF. i loaded it with 100ISO expired fujichrome film and snapped away in the garden. then, i had it cross processed (for those who might not remember, that means processing slide film in ordinary chemicals for negatives - it can produce some funky colors, especially with expired film). only a few of the photos turned out (i'm not sure why) - i did have some challenges in loading it and i actually broke the film trying to advance it (user error, not the camera).

i scanned the negatives in my photo scanner, but these are untouched otherwise, they're just as they came out of the camera.

i've got it loaded again and this time sabin took most of the roll. it's going to be interesting to see what happens. i can't help but think about all of the photos this camera has taken over the years and the scenes it has seen. and it also has a lovely bakelite body in a bit more of an art deco style (but i know from the serial number that it's from 1938).

all this talk about cameras has me thinking about some of the exciting things kristina and i are planning for across ø/öresund. stay turned for more on that. we've had a summer break and are going to be back soon with loads of new ideas and some really cool pictures from our first film swap film.