Jan 14, 2020 | Blog
I spent a month in Civita di Bagnoregio, an Etruscan hilltop town in Italy on a fellowship from the Civita Institute, (civitainstitute.org). Since I arrived home mid-December, I have been scanning and editing images. I am still not done but three days ago, finished scanning the 120 color negative film that I shot in a little pinhole camera called the Zero. It took a beating in Civita, the cobblestones, and the tuff rock outside, and the stone floors in the houses are all unforgiving. I dropped the camera, it broke, I taped it back together and kept going. It gave me 32 rolls of film with about 190 files. I shot so that each image related to the one before or after. This was a difficult thing to do but I wanted to overlap the images so I shot with the camera on a rectangular setting and advanced it as if it were set to a square. This way I did not get any lines between the frames of the negatives–and I made 16 images to a roll instead of 12. I could not see any of these images because the film had to be developed once I returned to the States. Also pinhole cameras do not have a viewfinder and I had to become astute at knowing what the cameras would see. Two things helped me get great negatives: the Pinhole Assist app which enabled me to use my iPhone as a light meter and the wonderful people at the Shot on Film Store in Lake City, WA (www.shotonfilmstore.com/), who developed my film and did a great job.
So what did I photograph? The old Etruscan hilltop town of Civita where people have lived for thousands of years: this is what was before me. The pinhole exposures are at least 10 seconds and no people showed up in my photos. Mostly I photographed every morning at sunrise until about 9:30 when the tourists started to arrive. I photographed the town, the streets (cobblestones with no cars), the landscape, the drop off at the edges of the town, the hilltop and the ancient church, the walls, the stones, the light, the fog, and of course the incredible color. (Overexposure exaggerated it). Doing this was a joy but made me quite nervous at the same time. Was I getting the correct exposure? Did I really think I could overlap the images and it would work? With the amazing amount of wind and rain would anything be discernible? What would the townspeople think of these images? The town is a museum but lived in as well. It isn’t the way it actually is became my mantra. Each day I would photograph with my Zero for a few hours, come back, eat breakfast, clean up the apartment and then go back out around noon to take some more photographs. The afternoon was more difficult with the number of tourists in the town and the light. In late afternoon I would eat some lunch, then work on the computer for a while and as soon as it got dark, go back out again and take night photographs with my DSLR. (see previous blog post janetneuhauser.com/civita-a-month/). Then a nice long Italian dinner and bed.
Now, as I scan and look and scan and look, I am slowly understanding what it was that I did. Mixing the landscape with the architecture made sense, but it was something I had not done before. I am posting thirteen images (including the featured image) that show the variety of the 120 pinhole images that were captured. All are from the Zero camera 120 on color negative film (except the first one, a double exposure from the 4 x 5 large format pinhole still color negative film in which I exposed the full moon outside my kitchen door all night long, then the walkway to the entrance in the fog on the same sheet of film). I find the editing process to be as satisfying as the shooting. Thanks for looking. (PS Click on the first image to get a slide show).
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The featured image is the top of the entrance to the Altar of the Virgin Mary down off the trail by the cliffs. Working titles of the others top to bottom, left to right are:
- Full moon trail and Walkway (Double Exposure/4 x 5 negative)
- Door
- Patio on the Edge
- San Donato #1
- Street, Buildings, Valley
- By Giovanni’s Stairs
- Partly Real
- Lions Gate with the Gate of Santa Maria
- An Imagined Space
- Arch and Fog
- Landscape with Buildings
- Walk to the Cliffs at Sunset (single image)
Dec 1, 2019 | Blog
I have been in Civita di Bagnoregio for the past month shooting pinhole photographs on a fellowship. Civita is a surreal, isolated hilltop town north of Rome and I fell in love with It. It survived largely due to the work of an architect, Astra Zarina and her husband Tony Costa Heywood, also an architect. Read this article to learn what Astra Zarina did with her fascinating life. (Astra Zarina). The Civita Institute, known also as NIAUSI, now manages the houses and awards fellowships to all types of people, among many other things. Their website, civitainstitute.org has so much information: you should go there and read about it.
So this is what I did.
I put 35 cameras from the Pinhole Project around the town when I first arrived. They were loaded with paper. Since these needed a good thirty days of exposure, I put them up right away. Not in the plan was how much rain there was, I mean a lot of rain and wind which soaked and moved the cameras: some so wet that I had to pour the water out when I retrieved them. The tape used to stick the cameras up did not work at all with the tuff, the rock of Civita. Instead I put the cameras on downspouts, railings, fences and trees. One went in a car. Some got taped to windows inside.
The response from the citizens of Civita was gracious and for that I am grateful. They seemed interested, respectful and kind. Not one of the cameras was taken down or messed with. Apparently there are no pinhole bandits about the area. I have retrieved the cameras I put up and am in Rome right now. The paper negatives have been removed from the cans and are in a light tight box waiting to be scanned; several cans have been given to interested people with which to make images to be retrieved later. I will scan my negatives as soon I as I get home! I also have 32 rolls of 120 C-41 (color negative) film from my Zero 2000. This film is waiting to be developed along with 30 sheets of 4 x 5 C-41 film shot in my Leonardo. All of that film, once it is developed can be scanned and shared. I have been researching developing my own color negatives but am a wee bit nervous to start with this batch. I have been told that it is easy and would certainly be less expensive. Please chime in if you have done this type of development before or want to help!
I also shot a lot of iphone photographs. I have always loved that camera. I will probably make a little book of these images. I have been publishing them on Instagram as a way to keep in touch with everyone and everything. It felt good to publish to Instagram which worked when nothing else did but What’s App. (What’s Up with that?) I will do a blog post of some that did not make it to instagram in the future. I just have to say: I hate the selfie stick and do not understand the need to photograph oneself in front of historical places or monuments or landscapes. I have never used the iphone in this manner. And I never will. Just saying.
I did not intend to but started also to work seriously at night with my DSLR. I brought it along as a kind of polaroid for the pinholes and was glad I did despite how heavy it was. The rain would stop and the town would glisten. Since the images are digital, I have been working on them and have posted some previously unfacebooked images here.
Patience. It will no doubt take me at least four or even six weeks or longer to get these pinhole photographs done. I do hope there is something valuable there that will intrigue me and you and enlighten us both. I learned some interesting concepts living in Civita: that I can eat well, make art and be happy that I actually forgot to lock the door at night. Photography at night is more physically demanding than the day but digital makes it seem easy. Digital gives us that shot of instant gratification. In the meantime, here are some night photographs as promised. Grazie a tutti cari lettori! Buona Sera!
Some Titles:
Moonrise in Civita
Night Delivery
The Arch Fantasma
Boar Hunting in the Moonlight
From the Street: A Home
Other Images are untitled so far.
Featured Image: Outside Alma’s: Toward the Ape
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)
Jun 25, 2019 | Blog
I know this about myself: I often make photographs and then don’t look at the actual images for a year, sometimes more. I can easily ignore whole bodies of work as I shoot them. I am not kind of photographer who shoots, reviews, edits, prints, then shoots more. For me, the best part of photography is in making the photograph in the field; it is exhilarating and much better than post processing. I find that when I edit as I work on an idea, the subject gets stale.
That said, one problem arises as long as I am hooked on film (and all my images these days are shot on film). It is absolutely necessary to write down the following soon after making the photograph: location, the date, the film type, exposure time, ISO, and of course the camera and pinhole size. I quit taking notes and writing down what I did when I got my first digital camera several years ago. Now after shooting film again for the last five years, I find I want to return to certain subjects and find the portals, the little river, the big trees, the end of a road campground, the slough. It is impossible to tell where many images were made. Good images and bad record keeping exists in my life. I vow to do better. I will take concise notes I will.
Of course with digital, one has lots of metadata but without GPS turned on, no location exists. But what is photography about anyway? Pinhole photography is about pausing for 30 minutes or more and just looking. Not that I eschew technique in pinhole photography. I am just not a technical kind of gal and refuse to pretend that I am. After all, the image is about feeling, the light, the moment, the weather and of course it is about the ISO of the film and the size of the pinhole aperture and the exposure times. I have began a notebook just for keeping film and camera data with little drawings of my photographs at the time I make them. Hopefully, this will help me be able to return to the scene. The featured image was taken on a road trip to California I think in 2016. It is a happy accident. I decided to try an all night long exposure and had a hard time getting up before dawn to close the camera. I actually closed it sometime after the sun came up. This image is easy to find again. But the exposure/film combo was not recorded.
The images below have unrecorded exposure times and location and were based on knowing that a good photograph could be made from what is in front of me. That is the exciting moment in photography. These are just a few of the total shot this way. Some can be found again easily, some can not.
Jun 14, 2019 | Blog
Each year about this time, Photographic Center NW has a fundraising event (https://www.pcnwchasethelight.org/). In the past it has been called Long Shot. This year it is called Chase the Light, which is what we photographers do. Anyone can shoot during a 48 hour period (last week) and one week later there is a pop up show at the Center where the images which were shot all within the same time period are for sale. This Saturday (June 15th) is the pop up show. Worth seeing and a great way to get inexpensive work and support the Photographic Center NW at the same time. I am happy to donate work to the Photo Center, a good place that I have been a part of for years. For me, the timing on this event is always rough: the shooting time coincides with the Georgetown Carnival, a wonderful celebration and street fair in my neighborhood. For the last ten years I have worked the Spin Art booth and for the last three years I shot for the PCNW event while working at the Carnival. This year, I wanted to make some portraits with my 120 zero 2000 pinhole camera. I knew they would be a bit blurry since the exposures were about ten minutes long. But my subjects held still and I set the camera so that it seemed like I was taking a rectangular image but I advanced the camera as if I were taking a square image. That meant no lines occurred between the frames on the negatives, a fact my scanner did not like at all. But a fact that I love. It made for some interesting combinations with images butted up against each other and I am happy to report that I made some images which are new to me. Exciting. So here are four from two rolls of 120 color negative film. Hope you like them as much as I do.
Self Portrait (from the series, Inside Out)
Martin and Roberta, 2019
Joanne, 2019
Featured image is also a Self Portrait, without an adjacent negative. The Self Portrait above, with the garden, titled, I Dream of Green, is the one in the pop up show.
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