Your Pinhole is Showing!

K. Waiting with bated breath for my 120 film to come back. But I am kinda ticked off at Dury's. Seriously people? Too expensive. You really have to charge twice as much as Walgreens for processing? THEN forget to put in my CD that you promised? That's it. I'ma do it myself, punks. Well, I'll get there at some point. For now the cashier at Walgreens is just gonna have to learn that when she sees me come in, it's time to page, "Customer assistance at the Photo desk..."

Now I have a darkroom. It's pretty ghetto, but it works just fine. I'll explain in detail shortly. Of course, I've discovered that to process my own film is a much more complicated task than

making prints. Maaaaaybe I will just sneak into the photo lab at MTSU.

I'm really not coherent right now it seems. Today on the way to Dury's I thought, "Hey I've only got 4 frames left on the Holga...I'll just take a couple shots on the way and drop off that roll, too." But the problem was it was pouring rain, as it has been all day, and will apparently be all week.

There's this awesome dilapidated barn on my way to school, and I've been wanting to shoot there for a long time. Today I had an excuse.

So I had Ry drive up and park out of sight from the road, and I got out and dragged out my two Holga 120CFNs, one purple (my inner child is pleased) and loaded with 120 film, and the other modified with 35mm, and my Canon TLb. I took a bunch of shots. I got soaked, covered in mud, and I'm sure I got several more bug bites.

But that barn is beautiful. It was such a surreal experience to be in a place that seems forgotten by time, with the sound of rain falling through the skeletal roof. It wasn't littered with beer cans and soggy trash...not a hideout for teenagers or shelter for some wayward hobo. I felt like I was intruding on ghosts. I'm worried that the pictures will be screwed up because I had to set the shutter speed on 30 due to the dim light, and I didn't have a tripod. But at least I finally got to check the place out. Who knows how long it will stay there before it's torn down?

The funny thing is, Ryan stayed in the car. HE is the real photographer, supposedly. And he

wasn't interested. I asked him to park a little closer and he grinned at me and said, "Ah Katie. She suffers so much for her art." :)

But my parter-in-crime and I did make some fantastic mischief yesterday. He made a pinhole camera as a demonstration for his speech class, and we finally got to try it out. It's basically a shoe box with a tiny hole poked through a piece of aluminum, and a cardboard "shutter" over the hole. After painting the inside of the box black, and making it light-tight with black tape, we put 5x7 photo paper inside it, sat it down in my backyard, and exposed the paper.

Then in the "darkroom," we developed the paper, and there was a negative image of what the pinhole saw. The pinhole allows for a wide angle and infinite depth-of-field. After scanning the prints and inverting them in Photoshop, the positive images looked like this:

Ryan in the yard: 7 minute exposure.

Sidewalk and house: 12 minute exposure

Evergreen Cemetery: 16 minute exposure.