"Sorrow drips through your heart through a pinhole..."

Those Death Cab lyrics have nothing to do with this post at all, but since I am on a DCFC kick and have been listening to their music lately and I love that song and it uses the metaphor of a pinhole... well. Why not?

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I visited The Grotto again a couple of weekends ago! It happens to be an Atlas Obscura location so I brought my pinhole camera and had some fun.

I mentioned that I am fascinated with the way pinhole photography renders people and crowds and I am continuing to experiment with this. I am especially interested in self portraits using a pinhole camera. Since the exposures are so long I can insert myself for an extended period of time into the photo and then I become a ghost in the photo. The photo above is an example. Here are a couple more:

It is all very fun to see the expressions on the faces of the passers-by when they see a wooden box on a tripod and it's owner doing something in front of this wooden box. I don't think they know what to make of it at all. Most of them ask about the wooden box and I am always enthusiastic about telling them about it but they get bored and their eyes glaze over when I mention the word "aperture."

You can see a couple non-self portrait photos from this excursion on Pinhole Obscura.

And here is the video for the song "Marching Bands of Manhattan," which is completely bizarre. As music videos tend to be.

A Carnival is setting up outside my window

A carnival is setting up outside my window on a hot summer day. The purple, blue, orange, red flag that entice people to buy elephant ears flap gently in the wind and are beautifully back-dropped by the blue sky. The road is blocked off. they have taken over the empty lot next door  and the street. People have to drive through the library's parking lot to reach their destination. I wonder what kind of excitement I will meet in the coming days.

A man comes into the library, asks for poetry. Shel Silverstein. He says he is a poet. He has a seat at the table next to mine and recites to me a poem that he wrote to a friend in her yearbook. It’s a terrible poem and I am annoyed by it. I have things to do. He then talks about the carnival. he works at it, works one of the games. He tells me how the carnival is fleecing the people in the town in which I live. He tripled the price of a light saber simply by turning it on at night, he says. He pulled stuff out of the garbage and made a necklace with it and people bought it, he says. we are basically selling people garbage he says. He recites another poem to me and, again, it is terrible. terrible rhymes and metaphors. but I am thinking about this man’s life and how it could be a poem. He tells me, “they took my brain out of my head when I was sixteen.”

Three days later as I was driving across town I saw that they were packing up and the convoy of brightly colored trucks was on it’s way out of town. Off to fleece other people I guess.

Pinholing at the beach

I am completely and totally obsessed.  It is all I think about.  What I can pinhole next? It has become a sickness. Should I get help? Or should I just continue on down this merry path and see where it takes me? Here are some favorite pinholed moments from our visit to the beach a few weeks ago.

There is more over here on Flickr.

I just received notice that my Zero Image has shipped. Stay tuned as I sink deeper into this madness.