Random Thoughts

I’ll be setting out several cameras on the winter solstice for six months, to make solargraphs until the summer solstice. I’ve made six new cameras for this.  I would have liked to have made them out of metal or plastic.  But I don’t have any experience or tools in working with either of those.  So, I made them from 1/4″ plywood and covered them with three coats of exterior paint.  I hope the paint and wood holds up.

Another concern I had was how to prevent water from dripping into the camera and onto the paper through the pinhole.  I placed a thin square of acetate between the pinhole (in brass) and the inside of the camera hole that houses the pinhole and sealed this up with super glue all around.  I left this out for a little over a week.  It rained several of these days, including the first day. The acetate must have quickly fogged up and remained that way.  Considering the camera was well sealed, this was not a surprise. The results were interesting, and I like this image. I have been experimenting with various ways of obscuring pinhole images, but I didn’t intend it for a six month exposure.  

"a few days in December"

“You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.” - Arlo Guthrie

"a few days in November"

This is a solargraph made over several days, about a week, as the trees went from being full of yellow leaves to a wind storm that bought most of the leaves down.

"Dying Grass Moon" - cyanotype on Canson watercolor paper

During September and October, I will be exhibiting a collection of long-exposure pinhole photographs in the Allenton Gallery at the Durham Arts Council in Durham, North Carolina.  These images were formed in homemade cameras, made from soup cans, cookie tins, paper board and other materials.  These cameras are then left outdoors; some overnight, some for up to six months.  The light they absorb records the path of the moon or sun across the sky.

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The February 20th night of the full moon was a special treat.  It included a total lunar eclipse.   I had built a pinhole camera to give me a full 180° image.  Its actually a single camera that holds three sheets of film in divided compartments.  I had tested the camera only once, using paper negatives, and it checked out OK.  On the evening of the full moon, I set it out on my deck.  Unfortunately, it was a partly cloudy night, and the clouds were rather thick the first few hours.  Then the clouds broke for most of the rest of the evening.  The eclipse started around 8 pm and continued until around midnight.  The eclipse is charted in the second image.  All three pinholes were open the entire night.  The azimuth was almost straight up, so the proper viewing of the prints would be to hold them over your head.

(click on image to see full size)

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