Happy New Year to all, and.... I've got 2 crazy pinhole stories. The first is from 1998 when I was flying to Maine to attend the Maine Photographic Workshops. My carry on was the smallest piece in my luggage set. It held film [35mm and 4x5], my 4x5 Graflex [with "real" lenses and the 3 focal length pinhole lenses] and a pinhole camera I had made out of a can for a 4x5 negative [paper]. This woman at the Boston Airport stopped my carry on at the inspection station for hand examination. She went straight for my pinhole camera and opened it up. It was empty, of course. She was suspicious, called over her supervisor and said I would have to surrender this. I showed her how it worked [shutter, lens, etc] and she still didn't want to give it back. I finally told her and the supervisor that if I was transporting something wrong in there, it would be deadly gases and in that case we'd all be dead. I now stuff my empty cameras with socks and the like.
The second story took place in 1989 when Warren and I went to Helen, Georgia. It's a town in north Georgia that remade itself into an Alpine-looking village. A MAJOR tourist trap, but a heck of a lot of fun. Anyway, Warren puts a pinhole camera on the tripod and stands in the middle of Helen's main street which is narrow and VERY BUSY with a constant stream of cars. So there he stands for 15 minutes, holding the camera so that the traffic wind doesn't tip the thing over and I'm yelling for him to take care of my tripod. Turns out, there was no negative paper loaded in the camera....oops! Since this is a G-rated digest, I won't print what he said when we found the camera was empty. I personally think he should have taken it again with the negative paper loaded, but he was a spoil-sport and didn't want to. Next? B-) Rosanne
