The mania didn’t keep me awake (much) last night – in bed by 11pm, asleep by 1am. Two hours to fall asleep is pretty typical for me.

Even better though, the mania has still been with me all day today. I got in to work and was nonstop again on the Project. I feel like I got more done in the last 2 days than in the previous 2 weeks. It’s been swell!

The only downside is that none of my other work got done. When I’m grooving on the Project, I don’t wanna do anything else. So I have to go in to the office on the weekend for a day, to catch up the other stuff.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying a nummy Adult Beverage, some dinner, and contemplating if I want to keep working tonight or not.

Mmmm. Adult beverage…

It’s always fun when the mania kicks in.

And I think it’s unfair that my manic phases are always so much shorter than the depressive ones.

Not doing anything too crazy – just got on a real groove with my Project. Working nonstop since lunch, and I’d keep going through the night but I’m getting tired, and I’ve run out of coffee fixings again.

And yeah, it has crossed my mind to go midnight-grocery-shopping, so I can stock up on more coffee fixings.

But the tiny part of my mind that’s still clutching to sanity tells me that normal people just go to bed when they get tired.

So I guess I’ll try and do the normal thing.

Though if I find this leads me into insomnia, I may well get back up and keep working. Or make that midnight grocery run.

It’s good to be productive.

I slept in again this morning. This time though, I managed to get to work right at 9:00, so I guess I’m not technically ‘late’. Actually we covered that whole ‘technically late’ thing already, didn’t we?

Anyhow, this time I have an excuse – I couldn’t sleep last night. And I wasn’t up all night worrying about the government’s machine that can detect sounds via their tax forms.

Around midnight, as I was laying in bed all cosy warm, instead of my brain going into offline mode, it switched to work mode and I had a bunch of good ideas for my Project. I was afraid that I’d forget them if I went to sleep, so I got up and started working on it.

I was really productive and worked till about 04.30 before I finally decided to go back to bed. So I think today’s sleeping-in is acceptable – the difference between 2 hours’ sleep or 3.

Now I’m at work, alert, and ready to meet whatever challenges the day bringzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I took a few more shots with my pinhole camera today. I’m still kind of amazed at how it works, and still chuffed to have made it myself.

There was only one glitch this time, when loading the camera, the leading edge of the film caught on some of the felt and dragged a bit of felt into the image. Otherwise it worked really well.

I was hoping the shot of the boat would turn out better – although I have an idea of the wide-angle-ness of the camera, I don’t have a good idea yet about how it frames the images. There were a few other shots I did that came out rather crooked – I don’t know if I need a rudimentary viewfinder, or just a level… At any rate, there’s no more technical issues I think – the issues are in learning to use it.

I took some more shots today with my home-made camera. Made a silly mistake though – the 0.3mm pinhole is about three and a half f-stops from the big misshapen pinhole from Saturday, but I forgot to adjust my exposure times accordingly. So a lot of shots were under-exposed.

Still, a few came out not-too-bad. It’s a bit of a soft dreamy look, and I still find it amazing that the images come out at all, with no lens, just a wee little hole.

I still need to fix the film gate along the top – the felt is still getting in the way a bit. Other than that, and the under-exposures, it’s working pretty well I think.

So after all the excitement on Saturday of taking and processing pictures from my home-made camera, yesterday I sort of settled down and evaluated.

Pinhole shots are expected to be ‘soft’ but my shots were too soft. I asked around, and it was suggested that the hole I was using was too big. I wasn’t sure how to measure things that are in the less-than-millimeter range, but then I got an idea – I’d use my negative scanner, and scan at a super-high resolution, then just count the pixels of the hole.

It worked, and also provided a very good enlarged view of my pinhole – not only was it too big, it was a mis-shapen mess! The pinhole equivalent of trying to take pictures with a lens that was cracked and scratched all over. No wonder my shots were so ‘soft’ aka blurry.

You can see in this comparison, the left side is the pinhole I was using on Saturday. Yuck! The right side is a new pinhole I made, that I’ll use on my next roll to see how it goes. It ought to be much sharper. The funny thing is these pinholes were both made with the same pin, in the same piece of aluminum – just obviously I was way more careful on the second one.

On the camera itself, I also finished up some more work on it yesterday – I decided that the winding knobs are good enough so I finished them off, I have a simple but effective mechanism for holding the back in place, and I added a second ‘shutter’ that hopefully will work in tandem with the pinhole – i.e. allow me to open and close the aperture without moving the camera around too much.

Camera Front

Here is the face of the camera. The knobs have been finished off, and I’ve added a new shutter mechanism for the pinhole module.

Closeup of Pinhole

The pinhole is punched in a razor-thin piece of aluminum, I’ve actually got three different holes in the aluminum so I could move it around and select the different holes. The aluminum is held in place by the brass strap, which is coated with black felt at the back.

The shutter is another piece of brass which rotates up out of the way. The pivot point has two washers and a spring, which allows me to adjust the tension while still keeping it tight. It too has black felt coating its back. There is a brass ‘pin’ to stop the shutter at the right point when it is closed.

Camera Back

The back of the camera is held in place by a fairly simple system, although I could improve it later. At the bottom of the camera I added two small bits of wood to hold the bottom of the back, and towards the top at the sides I drilled two very small holes, and just have a pair of brass nails that slide in and out, to hold the upper part of the back in place. I added another brass nail as a ‘handle’ to help extract the back once the sliding nails are out of the way.

The process of taking pictures is wonderfully complicated: First you set the camera in position on a tripod or whatever, angle it as best you can. There’s no view finder, just point and hope. It is a ‘wide angle’ so it will capture quite a bit of the scene. Second, you slide up the darkslide / safety shutter, after ensuring the pinhole shutter is closed. Third, rotate the pinhole shutter to the open position, being careful not to jiggle the camera.

Count off the exposure time, then rotate the pinhole shutter to the closed position. Fifth, slide the darkslide / safety shutter closed. And finally, crank the film advance knob while looking through the back window, to get the film to the next frame.

Today I had the opportunity to take some photographs with my home-made pinhole camera. It was a lot of fun, and some anxiety and excitement about what would come of it. I also found some definite issues that need addressing before I try another roll.

First, just relying on friction to hold the back in place was a Bad Idea. Very quickly the back was loose and I had to hold the camera carefully when moving it, to keep the back from coming off. Second – though fortunately not till I was finished – the tripod mount came out so I have to do some work on that to re-attach it more securely. And finally, my ‘shutter’ is too stiff. More of a darkslide than a shutter – I found I had to keep a finger over the pinhole, open the ‘shutter’, then remove my finger for the exposure. Then cover up with a finger again while I wrestled with the ‘shutter’.

But enough about the problems – what of the pictures? As soon as I got home tonight, I got to work. Nervously processing the film, double-checking to make sure I didn’t make a dumb mistake like putting the fixer in before the developer. When the fixing was finished, I couldn’t wait to open the tank and peek in while the rinsing was going on. There were images! As soon as the rinse was done I pulled the film out and looked at it – there were 12 images! I could see at once some were over-exposed, some were under-exposed. But pictures! My home-made camera made images! OMG OMG OMG!

Check them out:

All my outdoor exposures were about 5 seconds which was about twice as long as they should have been. When I scanned the negs, I adjusted the density to compensate. The indoor shot worked out really well as-is.

I must admit, I’m totally chuffed with the results. The biggest image problem is with the felt that helps move the film smoothly – I forgot to trim it after it was in place. So the image frame is all funky shaped and every image has a blob of felt fiber in the top-left corner where a big tuft of felt was sticking out.