Long Shot and the Pinhole

Long Shot and the Pinhole

Every year Photo Center NW in Seattle sponsors a fund raiser called Long Shot.  Essentially everyone shoots within the same 24 hour period and a week later a pop show happens with one juried print from everyone who registered and submitted.  It’s a great excuse to shoot even in the throes of life.  This year, Saturday, June 10th, the Long Shot coincided with the Georgetown Carnival where I have manned the Spin Art booth for I don’t know the last ten years….In the midst of spinning records with lots of paint involved I took some pinhole photos.  I used my old Zero 2000 and had it set on the inside for a rectangle view and advanced it as if it were set for a square view.  I got overlap and no frame lines, just as I hoped I would.  They negatives  are dense and grainy and very very colorful.  I  submitted four images to Long Shot (LongShot) of which there are a few versions here.  One was chosen from each person submitting for the pop up show.  The top image on below might be my favorite of the bunch. My shadow, the Spin Art Booth made with  the Zero 2000 on color negative film and it was chosen to be in the show!

 

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The Pinhole Landscapes

The Pinhole Landscapes

I am pleased to announce that six  of my Pinhole Landscapes will be on view this summer at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (bima.org) in a  show called Women in Photography;  I am one of ten women being exhibited.  When Greg Robinson, the curator asked me to be in the show, he wondered how being a woman had influenced my work.   It was an apropos question.  I have long wanted to photograph the landscape but not in the way it had historically been done.  I did not want to work in the same vein copying the greats, like William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and yes even Ansel Adams.  And it seemed that all the greats had been men.  Making the urban night photographs (Nighttime)  had inspired me to try the landscape in a kind of crooked way (see asterisk below).  I wanted color, mostly because I love the way the long exposures at night shifted the colors and recorded a certain kind of movement.  I knew I could not get that feeling  during the day with the a lens camera.  The pinhole camera allowed for both a long exposure and color.  I have owned a  4 x 5 pinhole camera for years with which I had mostly made still lifes (loupe-holes).  I began with an all night long exposure, and it was a perfect negative (a happy accident I later discovered).  I scanned that negative and printed it digitally. There was something about that image (Tomales), a seven hour exposure that made me realize that I could do the landscape both at night and during the day.  In a crooked way, with the pinhole, with film.   The long exposures, in the wind, rain, snow, darkness,  make the images soft;  the pinhole records light and time like no other type of camera. Mostly when I am making images with the that camera, I am pushing the exposure envelope hoping to get enough light on the film, hoping for the image that I see before me, but it is always turns out differently once it is developed. Sometimes I am constrained by the available light.  Sometimes I am in love with the light and the moment and simply hope for the best.  All in all, I am well into making the landscape my own way.  I am happy not to see the image immediately.  Not to be able to actually look through the camera.  I love the mystery and the uncertainty.  The crookedness of it.

I am beginning to understand that  photography is as much about time as it is about light and the pinhole  records both.  Each image seems to happen against the odds.  Usal Beach, below is an example. Taken on the Lost Coast in Northern California, on a dreary, gray evening. It felt creepy, with the  abandoned campground, dried-up river to the ocean, high crashing surf, strange noises one could hear but not see.  A whole town once existed on this site. The three mile drive on a treacherous dirt road keeps most people away.  Yet on the evening I made the image, it seems there had been many people on the beach that day, there were lots of footsteps in the sand. No one was there when this image was made.  The waves were close with a steep drop off yet the surf looks deceptively calm in the exposure.  While making the image, I had little hope it would turn out.  When I saw the negative a month later, I knew I had something.

Usal Beach, CA

I don’t mean to take creepy landscapes but somehow end up in creepy places. Usal Beach was followed by several more images but the one below taken near the Dyke Access Road on the Columbia River speaks to the same aesthetic.  Cottonwood Tree, Columbia River was made with the camera perched on a plastic box near the water.  It started to rain about 15 minutes into the exposure. A big ship came up the river, in from Astoria. It moved slowly and I decided to make the exposure the length of time it took the ship to come past the camera, about an hour. The cottonwood tree was a victim of flooding and erosion from a very wet winter. I was surprised how it seemed to be growing out of the water. The wake from many boats on the river must have created that effect because the tree looked like it was growing out of the mud when the photograph was made. Again, none of the boats appear in the photograph, because the exposure is too long to record their speed.

Columbia River, WA

There are four other images in the show.  One made three years ago, the others within the last year.  I hope you can stop by BIMA.  The show will be up the entire summer.  The work of the ten women included in the show is diverse and interesting.  If you are in the Northwest, the opening is on Saturday, June 24th, from 2-5 pm for friends of friends of friends, all are welcome.

Featured Image: The Little Klickitat River

 

Rachel and Nick Got Married

Rachel and Nick Got Married

This past fall, I was invited to the wedding of my dear friends’ daughter, Rachel.  I went not only for Rachel but for her mother, my friend Connie who passed away 3+  years ago.  Rachel  got  married on Cape Cod,  head over heels in love.  I know this because a year earlier, after knowing the groom to be for only a month, she told me he was the one.  Truly love at first sight.  When Rachel asked me  if I would take some photographs at the wedding,  I laughed.  I used to shoot weddings for money when I was young but quit the practice as soon as I was able to.  I am not good at shooting those types of events and I say hats off to the professionals who are able to capture moment after moment. Rachel and Nick’s wedding was not going to like a normal one and I said I would be happy to shoot a pinhole image or two, one for sure, the length of their ceremony, what ever amount of time that was.  In retrospect  it was actually quite hubristic to imagine  that such an exposure might work in the bright fall sun of Cape Cod.  And I had no idea where they were actually getting married. But I packed my 4 x 5 pinhole camera and some color negative film loaded into holders and hoped for the best.  The entire trip was bittersweet, full of laughter and tears.  Missing Connie all the while but feeling her presence strong.  I know she would have loved every minute of it.

The first image was made the night before the wedding-warm beautiful night on a Cape Cod beach.  We ate great food, talked, laughed, watched the sun go down and yes, those are all people on either side of the sun. We dug our bare feet into the warm sand, everyone and everything aglow in that orange light.  I was fortunate to get there in time for the setting sun and set up the camera and enjoyed

Rachel and Nick were married by a beautiful pond near Truro;  The weather was perfect and the light beautiful.  The exposures were so long,  but people are recognizable in the blur.  The landscape is  intact. In those 45 minutes there was the magic that happens when two people come together in love and celebrate that with their friends and family.  It turns out this was shortest exposure of the four that I took:  the  first image exposed for about an hour until well after the sun went down.  The dinner  image exposed  for about two hours while incredible food was eaten;   the lawn image exposed in the gray light of late twilight for about an hour.  Rachel was a beautiful bride, and it  so incredible to see someone I have known her whole life become an elegant, young woman.  Here is an  homage to Rachel and Nick and their love, so glad I got to make these images because you committed to each other.

 

The Party the Night Before the Wedding.

The ceremony.

Rachel and Nick wedding ceremony 45 minute exposure

 

After the wedding, everyone went to the home of Nick’s Aunt where we ate and danced and celebrated the beautiful couple.  The lawn photograph exposed until it got too dark to see, about an hour.

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Then, the meal!  Fantastic food with lovely wonderful people.  This exposure was about two hours. And finally when the dancing began, I closed the shutter.

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f/D Book of Pinhole

f/D Book of Pinhole

About six months ago I submitted some of my new pinhole work to the ƒ/D website call for work for a book on pinhole photography.  A passion for pinhole photography by Kier Silensky gave birth to a  book that will have ninety-nine images by pinhole photographers from all over the world.  My image, Under the Tracks/Inside the Box was accepted to be a part of this book.  Now the website Kier maintains, fslashd.com has started a Kickstarter site for the project in order to print the book as beautifully  as possible.

On the Kickstarter site, Kier states, “while photo books are a great way to collect photography, the pinhole photography community is greatly under-represented on bookshelves. In response, we ran a call for entry asking photographers to show us what they’ve seen through a pinhole. We received an overwhelming response from around the world, and selected 99 photos to publish in a book created to celebrate pinhole photography. In all, the book features 60 black & white and 39 color photos. The photographs represent techniques that demonstrate the “pinhole look” in general as well as the unique ways in which pinhole works with motion and time, bent film planes, infrared, and other techniques and formats.”

I personally still do not have a name for the camera that was constructed to make the  image that was accepted for the book. Basically it is a larger (2 x 2 x 2 feet) pinhole camera with a round hole placed right below the pinhole into which  a digital camera fits to  record the pinhole  image inside the box. A kind of mini-camera obscura room, aka Abelardo Morell, one of my heroes.    I am thrilled to be a part of this book and hope you will consider donating to the Kickstarter project so this book can be realized. You can go to the site  and see for the project for yourself:  the-f-d-book-of-pinhole.

I have made several images with this box as well as experimented with placing the DSLR inside of other giant camera obscurae and capturing the image that is made.  I am not sure where this work is leading me but it’s been fun!  I love the idea of making a pinhole image and capturing it with digital. Below I have added the image for the book and one other I’ve made with this camera.

Under the Tracks/Inside the Box

Outside the Sunny Arms/Inside the box

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The Pinhole Project Has Its Own  Website

The Pinhole Project Has Its Own Website

I  am happy to announce that the Pinhole Project now has its own website thepinholeproject.org .  It went live about a week ago and it is still   far from being complete.  Over the last three years, we have collected about 3000 images from eager and enthusiastic pinhole photographers all over the world.  As you know, these images are all long exposure, in small metal tins, exposed for at least 3 weeks sometimes much longer.  I am gratified and humbled by the response and always look forward to opening that tin, seeing the negative and making the scan.  The pinhole archive on this site will soon come down and all those images will be transferred over  to the new site which has a search box, so users can search their name to find where their image is on the site.  While this is a major improvement, there are still some snags to be worked out with that search mechanism.  Bear with us, because I think it is more important to be live while the snafus get worked out that to not be live at all. I will now dedicate janetneuhauser.com  to my personal photography and that is all!    The Pinhole Project site will not contain any of my recent pinhole work unless it is an image that is specifically done for the Project.  I plan to use the thepinholeproject.org to celebrate the work of all those pinhole photographers who trust in a tiny metal tin with a hole punched in it, and tend their cameras for long periods of time, sometimes coming back right at the end to find the pinhole bandit has come in his/her stealthy way and taken the camera  down.

Please visit thepinholeproject.org and enjoy all the beautiful images there.  And come back often because each week more images will be  added and soon all 3000 will be up.  Oh and don’t forget to put up a camera.  The winter months are dark and exposures take a long time!

Here are a few images to refresh your memory about just how fantastic this type of imagery is.  Top image is by Greg Staley, made in Maryland, the bottom is by Eric Riedel, made in Washington.

 

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Featured Image:  On my Window Sill with Curtains