Week 18, WPPD

As with others, I used my pinhole for this week’s roll for Worldwide Pinhole Photograph Day.  I decided to go to a local state park that always has interesting things to see, Gillette Castle state park.  It is a castle, built on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut river, by a stage actor who made Sherlock Holmes famous in the US.  I took my Vermeer 6×6 camera, loaded with Kodak Portra 160, along with a large ND filter.  All the photos developed and scanned by my local lab, Cooper’s Imaging.  I did a little level adjustment on a couple of them.

Because it was mostly cloudy, most of the shots have a pretty even contrast throughout.  With the sun though, I had to dial up the ND filter to close to max to get longer exposures (most around a minute).  Only the last shot is without the ND filter, and I think it was about 7-8 secs.  I used my iPhone app, Pinhole Assist for the exposure times, putting the ND filter over the iPhone camera lens.  They mostly worked out pretty well.

Approach

Sherlock Holmes

Under the Arch

Covered Porch

Walkway

View from Bluff

In this bluff view, there was actually a ferry running across the river but because of the exposure length all you see is a little disturbance in the river surface.  A Bald Eagle also flew right in front of me as I was setting up this shot.  Luckily I had my Olympus OM-2n shooting another roll so I was able to snap a few shots as it went by, but still have to develop those.  I’ll probably post them on my other blog.

West End

Brilliant Sun (whoops)

Under the Eaves

Carriage Entrance

“We’ll leave a light on”

 

[edit] I added a post on my blog showing the difference in perspective between the pinhole and a regular 35mm camera.  Plus a few other photos of the park grounds. [/edit]

The inside of the castle is currently closed, and because it was sort of spitting rain there were not many people at the park.  I did have a couple people ask me what kind of camera I was using and I got to explain the Worldwide Pinhole Camera Day concept.  One was a retired gentleman and he said he used to do film photography as a hobby in years past, doing his own B&W developing.  I told him a few of us are still around, doing the same, and it is a lot of fun.  I think I got a couple gears turning for him.

My local camera store is having a ‘Lensbaby’ demo next week, and we can borrow a lens for a few days and take photos for submission, so I’ll probably play around with that for my roll, most likely using my Canon EOS3 since they only Canon or Nikon mounts at the demo, and all my other SLRs use either OM or M42.