Reminder – World Pinhole Day is April 25th

Hidden Canal, Onondaga Lake Park, Liverpool, NY. Home-made Altoids pinhole, expired T-Max 400 developed in Diafine.
Just a friendly neighborhood reminder that this Sunday! Sunday!! Sunday!!! is World Pinhole Photography Day.
In previous years, I’ve been well-intentioned, but still never quite actually participated.
This year however, I’ve built a custom pinhole camera from an Altoids tin (would that make it a ‘mint-hole’ camera, a ‘pintoid,’ ‘curiously lensless’???) from scratch. There are still some kinks (light leak, frame spacing/film winding) but, knock on wood, I should hopefully have them ironed out by Sunday (Sunday!! Sunday!!!).
For more info:
http://www.pinholeday.org/participate/
Holga Hike – Another Beaver Lake Shot
Another image from the Holga Hike / Beaver Lake shoot.
The recent snow melt had created a temporary pond around two winter-barren bushes. There were all kinds of little birds frolicking amongst the branches, chirping, hopping and occasionally splashing away.
Even though I stealthily approached the scene in my best Elmer Fudd-esque stalk, my fine feathered friends all took flight before I could even raise the camera. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have been humming the Pink Panther theme out-loud.
Anyway, now looking at the image I ended up capturing, I don’t think it would’ve actually made much of a difference if they had stayed, as they prolly would’ve been indiscernible in the details.
Oh well.
Sorry for the dearth of updates lately. Physical therapy on my stupid knee has been taking its toll on my motivation, if not free-time.
Holga Hike – Beaver Lake Nature Center
Alas & alack, it just wasn’t meant to be…
I didn’t submit my Holga Hike image in time due to a mix of FedEx fumbling the delivery date of my fresh developer, family visiting for Easter and a misinterpretation of a vague deadline.
C’est la vie.
The good news is Randy from HolgaMods assures me that he’ll be running another Holga Hike in the Fall. So hopefully I’ll have better luck with that one.
At the very least, I was able take my wife on a lovely nature walk around Beaver Lake, while enjoying the beautiful first day of Spring; that was more than enough of a reward in & of itself.
Oh, and I also ended up taking a couple of photographs as well (all images taken with a Holga on Ilford HP5+, developed in Diafine):
Diamond Head
Diamond Head, the iconic Hawaiian volcano, is probably one of the most photographed mountains in the world and, as a good tourist on O’ahu, I tried my best to do my part.
From sea to summit, Diamond Head rises 762 feet; fortunately, the hiking trail inside the crater already spots you two-hundred feet of elevation for a modest 560 foot climb over a 3/4 mile to the top. I say ‘fortunately,’ because after the roughly 160 steps to the top and an odd little ladder scramble to the summit, my knees felt like they were made of molten iron, and not in a good ‘molten iron’ kind of way.
But the views from on top were worth it.
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Pali Pano
I’m starting to process some of the multitudes of images I captured on O’ahu this past December. The above photograph was taken at a tourist pull-off on the Pali Highway, a scenic route that takes you over (and through) the mountains from Honolulu to Kailua on the windward coast.
By its nature, it’s a shot that probably untold millions of tourists had taken before me and a shot that millions of untold tourists will continue to take in the future; in my imagination however, I’d like to think I was the first to use a vintage Diana F with Kodak Ektar 100 to make a multiple-exposure panoramic.
I’ll continue to process these images for now, as my wife is itching to scrapbook/album our entire vacation and wants to see what I have to contribute. So, I’ll post anything of interest here and then bulk load the rest up to flickr.
In blog news:
- – I’m learning enough CSS to finally tweak most of the little things that I disliked about the blog layout. I’m still not 100% satisfied, as I still don’t truly understand why certain aspects refuse to change, despite my better efforts; but I’ll continue to work on it.
- – If anyone out there is knowledgeable in WordPress, how do I get to fool around with the ‘dynamic_sidebar’? I want to have widget-specific CSS, but the sidebar doesn’t separate label widgets independently. Am I even making any sense?
Kodak Jiffy II
The Kodak Jiffy II, a nifty $5 find at a recent garage sale.
A folding 6×9 ‘six-20’ camera with two viewfinders (horizontal & vertical), the original Jiffy had a really cool Art-Deco motif; the sequel here just has a plain black faux leather covering. It has a ‘twindar’ lens with two focus settings: ‘5-10ft’ & ‘beyond 10ft’; two shutter speeds: ‘I’ (about 1/60) and ‘T’ (bulb) and two apertures as well.
It needed some TLC after I purchased it. After a thorough cleaning, the biggest problems were a sticky shutter and folding mechanism. Careful application of some ball-bearing oil resolved both issues. As Kodak discontinued its ‘six-20’ film for quite some time now, I trimmed the plastic spindle on a roll of 120 film and used the metal 620 take up spool that came with the camera.
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