Nov 30, 2019 | Blog, Pinhole Wedding Photography
I shoot weddings with my pinhole camera. Recently I shot three wonderful weddings of people I know well. These are not typical wedding photographs. I generally shoot four images on 4 x 5 color negative film; the exposures vary with the available light but can be as long as 30 minutes. I do not use a flash. For most weddings I shoot the cocktail/greeting time before the wedding (or the party the night before), the ceremony itself, the celebration afterwards and then set a camera up during the meal. I feel the images turn out to be very personal. About a year or more ago, I shot John and Meghan’s wedding in Seattle. It was a very dark venue and a dark evening and I honestly thought none of the images would be okay. But they were and I was happy and so were Meghan and John. Last summer I shot a beautiful outdoor wedding for Autumn and Matt. They were married at Autumn’s parent’s home, and it was absolutely the most wonderful time: great people, great food and love everywhere.
Recently this past October I shot Isaac and Annie’s wedding in New York City. I have known Isaac his whole life and I was so happy that he and Annie got together. It was the first time I used my 120mm camera at a wedding and I knew it was right because the camera is so versatile. I could take more images and the exposures were shorter. Early in the morning we met in Brooklyn Heights and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge where we did a family photograph with the 4 x 5 pinhole camera. We continued to City Hall in Manhattan where the vows were made. After, we had a celebratory luncheon in NYC’s Chinatown; I recorded the luncheon on 120mm color negative film-about an hour and a half exposure. Annie wore a yellow dress; she was beautiful and the day flowed along. The party that night at a bar in Brooklyn was dark, very dark and very fun.
I have done several weddings now beginning with an old friend, Lucas, who married Angie in upstate NY several years ago. It was a great experience and I loved it so much more than I did taking “real” wedding photographs as I had done in the past. Not to say that real wedding photography is bad. It is just not me these days. I have two more weddings scheduled for this summer. It is great way to attend a wedding and be myself. I tell the bride and groom: if the images turn out, great, if not, I am sorry but I tried. But so far (fingers crossed), the images have all worked. Below are photographs from those three most recent weddings. If you know anyone who might be interested in this manner of wedding photography send them to me. I reserve the rights to the images but give the bride and groom fine art prints. I hope you feel the joy that I felt as I made these images. All people that I photograph with the pinhole understand that these will not be “normal” photographs. And most hire a “real” wedding photographer to grab the normal shots. And I am happy there is a real photographer present.
The featured image is from Isaac and Annies Wedding in NYC in October of 2019
Here is a blog post about Lucas and Angie’s wedding, my first pinhole wedding: www.janetneuhauser.com/in-honor-of-g-lucas-crane-on-his-wedding-day/
First wedding is Meghan and John’s over a year ago now. In Seattle.
The photographs below are from Autumn and Matt’s wedding last summer in the Pacific NW.
These photographs are from Isaac and Annie’s wedding in October in New York City.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed these photographs! Celebrate love! I am grateful to all the brides and grooms who are open to this manner of wedding photography.
Sep 30, 2019 | Blog
I decided recently that almost everything I shoot going forward will be with a pinhole camera on film. In a world where the average photographer will take several hundred images of an event like the recent Climate Strike March in Seattle, it was not really an easy decision. I thought a lot about how I take so many photographs generally and never use them; instead storing them away in the depths of my external hard drive and never looking at them again. So I went to the Climate Strike March in Seattle with my pinhole camera and one roll of 120 color negative film and of course my iphone camera. I took 15 shots with my pinhole camera. I took about ten images with my iphone, just because I could not resist and I had to have something to post to Instagram where all my images are from the iphone. Below are the photographs made in my 120 Zero 2000 pinhole camera. The images are lined up on the film with no line between them, no separation between the negatives at all. I fell into this modus operandi quite by happy accident of course and it turns out that it works well for me. Of the 15 exposures I got something I can use on almost every negative. I am pretty happy with that and it shows me the validity in slowing down and really looking. When I got the negatives back from the lab, I realized I could have exposed about half of the time I did and the negatives would have been less dense and less blurred. I’m not sure if that would have been better or not. These exposures were about 10 minutes. I learned a lot at this march. I learned that being present while making photographs is important. Taking so few images helped that and then standing quietly while the images exposed was good too. I also answered a lot of questions about pinhole photography. It does not seem to be a common thing. I feel like this is a new beginning for me. I have some other images I have made in the same manner. I will post those soon.
Leaving Cal Anderson Park (Two negatives)
Toward Downtown with Smith Tower (Three negatives)
Crossing I-5 (four negatives)
At City Hall (two negatives)
Featured image is at Cal Anderson Park: The Beginning (one negative)
Dec 11, 2018 | Blog
As most of you know I was a high school photography teacher for 24 years. I loved the job, working everyday with young people who were intrigued by and creative with photography. Teaching them was fun. I have now retired from that job. I hate that word retired. It sounds as if I am off to bed to do nothing for the remainder of the days I have left. For me retirement is not about that. I developed a good work ethic over the years as a high school teacher which continues to pay off now: I get up and drink coffee with my work. I honestly do not know how I had time do the high school job. I spent at least 60 hours a week working including with the commute (which involved a 30 minute ferry ride). On top of that I tended to my studio and did what I could with my personal work. I had shows and grants and sold photographs but it was “on the side.” Now it is all about simply producing for the pure joy of it.
So what am I doing right now? The Pinhole Landscapes of course. The Innards Portfolio as I have come to call those images. I am also working on a cookbook of my Mother’s recipes, the DSLR images I randomly take, the Pinhole Project, and two personal pinhole projects called Getaways and Home (a future post is in the works) and I of course am updating my two websites and applying for grants. The Pinhole Landscapes involve a lot of post-processing: the negatives are very dusty and the color is off. Sometimes I reverse them horizontally. Sometimes I change things in photoshop: the aspect ratio, the background among other things. I want these images to knock me for a loop, just like the darkroom has in the past. I refuse to be judgmental about post-processing decisions.
I just spent 17 days in November in New York City photographing the archive of my dear deceased mentor from graduate school, Judy Seigel. Many things amaze me about her work. She produced a huge, incredible body of images from the about the time I met her (in the early 1980s) until about 2015. Her work ethic was so strong. She was not always easy to be around. She asked me hard questions and got impatient when I did not have an answer. Yet I learned so much from her and I have continued to learn from her looking at her images while I photographed them. She produced a strong and unappreciated, odd body of work. She had an unique vision. She was experimental and fearless. She thought a regular silver print without any “post factory manipulations” was boring. Her work inspires me to go into the darkroom with the Innards Portfolio. They are film negatives after all. I have an idea to transform these images and make them both about process and the image. I will let you know how that works. Meanwhile, the studio is glorious, depressing, exhilarating, Some days I do not go out: I mean I do not go outside at all. Forgive me if I have canceled a date with you. But now that I have the gift of time, I am using it.
In the past I eschewed the DSLR. But in fact I am shooting with it now and again, especially when I am on a road trip. Here are some photographs with the DSLR from my recent trip to the Grand Tetons. I did shoot a lot with the pinhole camera as well, and I took along a telephoto lens (a rarity for me) for the DSLR. I used it to make studies for the pinholes. Maybe you will see some sort of relationship between the two types of shooting. Maybe not Let me know. You can see two of the trip’s pinholes in the More Innards post. Another post on them later.
To the Grand Tetons and Back, 2018
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These images are but a few of the 500 or so that I made with the DSLR. It will take some time to sort them out. The images above have popped out as favorites. The featured image is from inside a cabin near Jackson Lake with the Grand Tetons in the background.
Jun 6, 2017 | Blog
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
Feb 24, 2017 | Blog, Pinhole Wedding Photography
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.
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.
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.
