]twenty-six paces[ : What the Room Saw Part III

The Windows on Main St exhibit has ended, but I'm still catching up on ]twenty-six paces[ related stuff.

From the point at which I first paced out the ]     [  between Artisan Wine Shop and Beacon Pilates, and first really took notice of the tar patchwork "scrawled" along the center of the street, I was immediately interested in it as a drawing. 
In the video below, I try my best to mimic the work on the canvas before me.

 I had the idea of delineating details seen through the window by drawing on the window early on.  That intention led to the thought that I might be able to create monoprints using the window as my printing plate.  Last week I made my first attempt at pulling a print from a side window.  It's crude, but it's a start.

 The yellow on the paper was preexisting, remnants from another effort. 

The exhibit is over, but many related projects I planned for originally have not been completed, and new ideas born out of those early thoughts have yet to be followed up on, but with the indulgence of the Tim and Mei at Artisan and Juliet at Beacon Harvey, I hope to continue working to resolve some of these ideas.

Eye Candy Friday: Making Sausage

This week's treat comes via Arthur Hash's blog The Art Escape Plan. I'm not sure what the origin of this gif is, but It's pretty cool, particularly the reverse view. Lovin' the animated string.

Breaking News: Pinhole Photographs of Hurricane Irene

We were spared the torment that Hurricane Irene wrought upon many across the Hudson and up in Vermont.  A couple of inches of water in the basement, loss of cable and internet for a good part of a day and the loss of a day of work was as much of a cost we at Kamp Maykr had to pay.
It seems possible that since the impact on that megalomaniapolis, NYC, was less than feared, Irene will be remembered as a dud of a storm even as the devastation it wrought upstate in New England resulted in homes and entire villages being destroyed by storm related flooding.

Inspired by my new found fondness of pinhole camera shots as part of my ]twenty-six paces[ endeavors - and since I had several sheets of photo paper on hand  - I decided to document the effects of Irene in long exposure black and white images.  These are the resulting images of setting Mabby 1 and Mabby 2 in the windows near the porch and the back yard and seeing what they would capture.

After the deluge.

A post-storm, pre-wind-gust shot of the garden and shed, neither were any worse for wear when it was all over

]twenty-six paces[ : What the Room Saw Part II

8/13/2011 8 mins

In a previous post, I mentioned creating pinhole camera prints from the vantage of the two points anchoring the tin can telephone in both Artisan Wine Shop and Beacon Pilates.  Angelika and I exposed two sets of prints on two recent Saturdays.  Last weekend, we finally got a peek at the results.

8/13/2011 8 mins

Angelika treated me to a basic developing lesson in the darkroom at Fovea.  It was something new for me, but also something very familiar.  It was like was channeling all those memories of darkroom scenes from movies and tv.  It was a real Greg Brady moment.  I seem to remember at least one episode of the Brady Bunch (turns out it's an episode called "Click" from season 3) in which Greg sets up a darkroom in the bathroom.  I have retained a vague yet vivid image of that red tinted scene and even as I try to remember all the times I've seen similar scenes in movies and tv shows, Greg Brady's version is for in my mind.

Above is a re-enactment of Angelika developing the pinhole prints in Fovea's darkroom....just imagine this scene happening when the lights are off.  It's the first time I had been in a darkroom like this and I was impressed by how much one's eyes are able to adjust so well and how functionally visible everything was in there with just that little bit of red illumination.   

The cameras: Mabby 1 (right) and Mabby 2 (left)

The two sets of exposures made in August were short, 8 and 12 minutes.  Today I took I took another set of exposures of an hour in length.  Hopefully there will be much more information visible in the Beacon Pilates view.

8/20/2011 12 mins

8/20/2011 12 mins

I really love that creating an exposure with a pinhole camera is such a dumb, passive process - and one that is so receptive of the chance occurrance.  You just set it somewhere, open the lens and let it go.  It's a chance operation in a box.  It's not just  a bit magical either; a very lo-fi replication of how our eyes function.
In this case, I'm using 5"x7" black and white paper for a negative.    The rich blackness, particularly in the underexposed prints is pretty great - even if not as detail laden as hoped.
The point in pursuing this as part of the ]twenty-six paces[ project was to capture a moment in time in the relationship of these two locations to one another.  Ideally, two simultaneous views along that line I articulated with Telephone.  That the representational aspect of this action is not entirely reliable adds to it for me - allows for something else to seep in.
I'm hooked.  I plan to continue taking shots, and hopefully incorporating this form of image making into the overall process of my work.
I've named these two cameras Mabby 1 and Mabby 2, loosely after my twin nieces.  I expect to make more and perhaps explore the sculptural possibilities of the cameras themselves.  There are certainly some very innovative constructions of pinhole cameras.