2018 Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

As always, the last Sunday in April is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Getting accepted in and participating in a couple of shows and exhibitions has been pretty intoxicating, so it was a pleasure to go out and take photos just for the joy of participation.

I didn’t make a new lens this year, I just re used the one from last year

I went out with one subject in mind, and fortunately, got distracted by all of the possibilities I found along the way.

How could I resist the Emeryville City Hall,  one of my favorite East Bay buildings?

As I was shooting, I notice this interesting Giraffe* out in front of a café’

I returned home, and shot a couple of our household friends, a wall shelf in the dining room

 

 

and this Cat head doll my daughter made

 

 

In the end, I chose to use the Giraffe, it was more fun.

 

You can see the post here-

http://www.pinholeday.org/gallery/2018/?id=1091

 

But the greatest pleasure of the WWPPD website is to just start anywhere, and start scrolling through all of the terrific images that have been submitted from all over the world. Because I am a Do it Yourselfer, my additional pleasure is seeing all of the really clever contraptions my colleagues have devised to capture their images.

This ingenuity is still one of the strongest elements of being humans-making our own tools.

 

*No animals were harmed in the shooting of this photo.

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Driving Into the Future.   Copyright 2014  Jimmy Reina

 

I have a thing for Palm Trees.

I was raised in the American Midwest, and Palm Trees just weren’t part of the natural urban   environment of St. Louis, Mo.

The arched, dome topped building is the Emeryville, California Town Hall, built in the late 19th or an early part of the 20th Century. The way that unique, classic building entry is framed by those two beautiful Palms, gave me a kick every time I went by there.

A few years ago, City Hall expanded, adding the modern glass structure (and more Palm Trees).

Every time, I drove by, I thought, the contrast of these two buildings was a picture I wanted to take.

So I did.

Emeryville has a colorful past, and probably a bright future.For most of the 20th Century, it housed slaughterhouses, manufacturing, steel mills and warehouses. There was also a period when it was known for its speakeasies, bordellos and gambling houses. Local legend has it that one of its Mayors conducted most City business from a local saloon, rather than City Hall (how could he not want to spend time in that great building!).

With the American decline in manufacturing, Emeryville looked like ghost town for a few years, but it seems to have turned around in the 1990s as shopping (IKEA), bio-tech (Chiron/Novartis) and other tech concerns moved in (most notably, Pixar).

As I was shooting this photo, a Model T pickup truck rolled through, driving past the “old” Emeryville building, and moving towards the new.

It was just dumb luck that I was standing there with a camera-a happy accident.