Lensloos: Pinhole photography and more

Pinhole fotografie levert prachtige beelden op, maar het wordt toch wel altijd gezien als een tool voor autonome kunst, series of losse beelden. En pinhole als een reportage / journalistiek instrument? Nee, dat niet. Zo dacht ik er ook over, maar een poos geleden gebeurde er iets dat mijn idee deed kantelen. We waren op vakantie in Normandië, en ik had een 6X6 pinhole camera bij me op een dagtrip langs de stranden en andere herdenkingspunten van D-day. Op verschillende plekken maakte ik foto’s, en toen ik naderhand (weer thuis) de contactsheet bekeek trof het mij: dit was niet zomaar een serie foto’s, dit was een reportage van een dagtrip naar D-day gebied!
Sindsdien weet ik: ook met pinhole kun je een “journalistieke”  reportage maken. Niet met actiefoto’s, maar juist een wat rustigere en contemplatievere aanpak.
Zo af en toe doe ik dat dus. Hieronder een aantal foto’s uit de D-day reeks.

De expositie in café Blackbird is gestopt.
Daar hangt nu ander werk (ook de moeite waard).

Maar de afgelopen week heb ik de expositie in het oude stadhuis ingericht, en Utrecht Lensloos is nu te bezichtigen tot 30 augustus. In verschillende bladen en online media heeft inmiddels een aankondiging gestaan, en op vrijdag 7 juli is de officiële openingsreceptie. De gemeente had de lijsten van 70X100 netjes klaarstaan dus ik kon maandag goed aan de slag. Ook is er een vitrine waar ik de pinhole camera’s heb uitgestald waarmee de foto’s zijn gemaakt, en draait er een diashow met allerlei foto’s uit 15 jaar pinhole werk.

Ik ben blij met het resultaat, en ik hoop dat er veel mensen komen kijken en ervan kunnen genieten. Hieronder wat foto’s van het inlijsten en ophangen.

De crowdfunding actie is afgelopen, en geslaagd! Iedereen bedankt!!!!
Ik heb het hele budget binnengehaald (104%) en kan dus alles realiseren, de expositie wordt zoals bedacht: grote prints met de Utrechtse tafels serie, en nog grotere prints op dibond van de Utrecht Anamorph serie. Plus een leuke brochure.

De opening voor genodigden en donateurs is op 7 juli, en daarna is de expositie tot eind augustus te zien het oude stadhuis,
Korte Minrebroederstraat 2, maa t/m vrij 09:00 – 17:00 en donderdagavond tot 21:00.

De werken in Parnassos en Seats2Meet zijn weg, maar er hangt nog een mooie serie pinhole werk in café Blackbird, Oudegracht 222 in Utrecht.
Dat is een serie met pinhole “vakantiefoto’s”  uit Mumbai en Brussel, hieronder een paar voorbeelden. En ze hebben daar ook uitstekende koffie en lekkere koekjes dus …. 🙂

In juli en augustus is er een pinhole expositie in het oude stadhuis van Utrecht.
Daarvoor ben ik bezig met een tweetal series onder de noemer “Utrecht Lensloos”.

Omdat het me leuk lijkt om hier wat meer te doen dan zomaar ophangen van een serie pinhole foto’s, heb ik een crowdfunding campagne gestart om het benodigde budget voor de extra’s en de speciale prints bij elkaar te brengen.

Alle informatie is hier te vinden: https://www.voordekunst.nl/projecten/5427 

Verder zijn op dit moment in Utrecht maar liefst 3 plekken waar mijn pinhole foto’s te zien zijn:

In Seats2meet Utrecht CS hangt een serie van 6 pinhole foto’s, naast een serie van clubgenoot Trevor:
 

In Blackbird coffee&vintage (Oudegracht 222) heb ik een aantal pinhole foto’s hangen die op reis zijn gemaakt:

En in cultuurcentrum Parnassos in de Kruisstraat is een expositie van fotoclub de Verbeelding, waar ik lid van ben. Daar hangen drie series pinhole foto’s, waaronder een serie gemaakt op de D-day stranden in Normandië

A few years ago my work was accepted for a curated pinhole show in Le Bourget near Paris. This was an exhibition with a theme: the four classical elements Earth, Water, Fire, Air. A great challenge, and I was happy to be accepted with a series of 4 images. Paris is not that far from Utrecht where I live, so I decided to drive there and attend the opening night. It was a nice experience, and there were quite some fellow pinhole photographers to meet, some from as far away as the USA.
Here is picture of us at that opening night:

It was very nice to be there, meet them, and see my own work hanging on the gallery wall.

And then the exhibition moved from Paris to Barcelona, and from Barcelona it moved on to Basque country,  in the north of Spain.
And then it was lost… The four works, which were images printed “ready to hang” on forex, never came back. Which is a pity, because this printing method is quite expensive. I asked the curator/organizer on the whereabouts of the works. No response… So they are lost forever, I suppose.

But I still have the original negatives, so here I can recreate the series, in my own virtual exhibition space 🙂

Here they are, my pinhole interpretations of the four classical elements
Earth, Water, Fire, Air!

Exhibition july/august 2017 !

It’s still some 8 months to go, but I’d like to share news on my upcoming exhibition in july/august 2017. This exhibition (working title “15 jaar lensloos”) will be in the lobby of the city hall in Utrecht. A great opportunity which I’m very happy with.
And now begins the hard part: selecting my “best” images and series, and creating a good coherent exhibition. As the curator of Utrecht city hall says: ” we provide the wall space and the frames, and you need to kill your darlings”….But 8 months is enough time to select, rework, select again etc… 🙂
These two images will certainly be included:
The “Schwarzwalder bote” newspaper lying on a chair

The anamorph image of a well-known spot in Utrecht, with the Anne Frank statue.

Although pinhole photographers are not that interested in new gear (we don’t need lenses), sometimes I want to expand my camera collection with a new type, either by making it myself or buying it. I wanted a panoramic camera that goes beyond my current 6X12 format.

After a dissappointing experience with Ondu (they got many, many orders for their various formats and couldn’t deliver everything to everyone in time), I looked out for another supplier of a pinhole camera with extended landscape format.

And I found James Guerin who produces and sells cameras that go by the name of Reality so Subtle. You can find him here: Au Premier plan

I ordered the 6X17 model, and it was at my doorstep within a week 🙂
Now that is prompt delivery!

This is what the camera looks like:
This machine is heavy, sturdy, and lives up to James’ statement “excellent CNC quality” (whatever that means). Loading the machine is quite a trick, I used a pair of fishbone tweezers to get the roll of film thru the path. That helped, will be my standard loading tool.

Here are the first result of this camera, in the first roll I only used the the regular lower pinhole. Next time I will try out the raised pinhole, which sets the horizon at the bottom of of the image. Because of the circular film path (with prevents light fall-off) the edge of a straight objet (the table) close to the camera gets deformed, but that’s part of the extras you get with this type of construction!

I think this camera will travel with us on our trip to Tuscany, very curious how Italy looks thru the 6X17 pinhole format!

Every last sunday in April is WPD (world pinhole day): take a pinhole picture, upload to a worldwide gallery of images shot on that particular day. Although there’s a 30-day period for uploading, I like to upload on the same day. I have built a polaroid pinhole for that purpose, but recently I have created a pinhole body cap for my little digital Fuji:

So now the Fuji can take care of the “same day upload”.

The group of pinhole friends that I joined for a great WPD walk two years ago in Amsterdam are doing a get-together in Barcelona this year, but sadly enough I could not make that 🙁

Had to to stay around Utrecht this year.
The plan was to go to the “waterloopbos” for a day of walking and pinhole shooting with Marco de Vente, but the weather predictions were very bad, so we canceled it (we’ll do it some other time, no worries).
But what to do on WPD 2016? Stay inside (warm and dry), or wait for the few sunny moments that might occur and go out when the sun shows itself? I opted for the last strategy, but made sure to take a pinhole shot at breakfast, just in case:

Luckily the sun came through, so I took the cameras and went for a ride.
First stop at a bridge in my home town of Utrecht, which has a nice set of barriers:

Then move on to a place that was tipped to me by a fellow pinholer, an artwork/landscape location. This consists of a concrete “bunker” (military hideout) which has been cut through the middle, and then a path was created. This path leads from the dike to a small lake.
The weather was great: clouds all around, but during the two hours I was there, the sun shined brightly. Here are some shots which I took, some taken with the fuji in pinhole and some iphone shots I took of the setup with the Anamorph camera and the 8Banners Mb. The two rolls of film are to be developed soon, so there will be some more images to show in a week or two. That will be a blog entry called WPD-II  🙂

Then back home, with a stop at Starbucks, where the little Fuji made some extra shots, like this one:

Finally, here’s the shot that I selected for  the WPD gallery. My shadow is in the foreground, hiding the tripod and camera:

I’m curious to the results from the film cameras, especially the anamorph.
One advantage of this day near home over Barcelona: if they are all wrong, I can always go back!

A lot of pinhole photographers experiment with unusual positions or viewpoints.
The camera’s we use are not expensive, so it’s no big deal if something goes wrong.
One of the ideas I picked up from the various forums is to lay the camera on it’s back, and see what happens. Below are two sets of pictures: the pinhole camera lying on it’s back (in the “domkerk” church and the Louwman museum) and the resulting image.
Worth the try (also with lens cameras) !

Veel pinhole fotografen experimenteren met ongewone standpunten. Omdat we met goedkope camera’s werken is het niet zo erg als er iets mis gaat.
Eén van de ideeën die ik vond op de diverse pinhole forums was om de camera op z’n rug te leggen, en zien wat het resultaat is. Hieronder twee sets foto’s: de camera liggend in respectievelijk de domkerk en het Louwman museum. Het proberen waard (ook met lens camera’s) !

In the center of Leiden, close to the train station, is a cafe called “Eigen Zorg”.
This what it looks like from the outside:

Everyone that enters this café is surprised: it’s like going back 50 years in time.
The tables and chairs, the dark wood panels, the reading table and the old huge television, the drinking cups, all is unchanged since the sixties. So I have started to take pinhole  pictures. It’s close to an office location where I regularly work, so I can hop in during lunch hour, order a coffee, and set up my camera. Usually no more than two or three shots at a time, because some spots in the room ask for exposure of 20 minutes or so.

But as the lady that owns and runs the place is full of nice stories and witty remarks, that’s not a bad thing to do. I once returned and announced that I needed to place the camera for way longer exposures than the last time, and she responded “that’s OK, I’m open till eleven this evening” 🙂
These are the first pictures I took (you can see the owner in the second one, chatting for the four minute exposure):


And this is a picture taken in the back of the room:

There are more pictures to find there, and I’m still returning regularly to place the camera (the 8Banners Mb in 6X12 mode) on other spots in the room, on the bar, near the window and so on.
So I’m gradually building up a series of pinhole pictures, that will form a portrait of a café where time has stood still. I will then  create a nice gallery on this site.
And of course I will take a few prints for the lady at Eigen Zorg to keep!