Rotation Week One - Photography

Photography – Pinhole Cameras

This week we did our first rotation project, which happened to be photography. I’m not a huge fan of photography myself because in the past I haven’t been particularly great at it, but I really enjoyed this rotation because I felt I could potentially become quite good at it with some training and tutorials. I liked the way that pinhole camera photography is very much based on guesswork, and can be quite hit and miss at times.

Photography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures via photographic film (which we used) or an electric sensor. Light patterns are reflected or emitted from the objects which activate a sensitive chemical or electronic sensor during a timed exposure.

At the start of the week we wrote some definitions of parts of a camera to aid us in understanding what we would be creating later in the week, e.g. a shutter allows light into the lens to take the picture, in optics an aperture is a hole from which light travels through and a lens captures the light from the subject and brings it into focus. We quickly talked about exposure control as we would need this information later on in the project to work out how much exposure our pinhole cameras would need. Our photography tutor showed us some of his previous work to show us what could be achieved from it; a few of us even recognised some of his work!

Pinhole cameras are cameras with no lens and a very small aperture; it is basically a light-proof box with a hole in the side. We measured the distance from where we intended to place the lens and where we would place the photographic paper, as we would need this value later on to work out the exposure time. To make sure our boxes were light-proof we painted the inside black to stop light bouncing around; this was lots of fun as Arti and I managed to cover our table and ourselves in black paint as well as the box!

After our boxes had dried (after some failed attempts to dry them under broken hand-dryers) we cut a 2x2 square in our boxes which will act as our lens when taking our pictures. We tell gaffer-taped a piece of thick foil (from a curry pot or Mr. Kipling cake) over the lens, and gave it a small hole through the foil with a pin. I then made a shutter to cover over the front of the foil to stop unwanted images being captured on the photographic paper. And that was it! Pinhole cameras were made!

Early Wednesday we worked out the exposure time each of us would need in order to develop an image for inside and outside. To do this we needed to work out an f-stop. And to get this value, we needed to divide the length from lens to photographic paper (which we calculated earlier) by 0.8 (the average size of the pin). Mine was: f-stop = 115 / 0.8; this worked out to be 143.75. Tim then worked out that for my box I needed to have an inside exposure time of 20 minutes, and an outside exposure time of 1 minute.

I decided to have my photographic paper slightly curving around the box, to get a panoramic image. The photographic paper can only be handled in dark conditions, otherwise it would be spoiled and it wouldn’t be able to capture an image. So we loaded up our photographic paper in a dark room and gaffer-taping around the lid of my box to make sure it won’t move during exposure time.

And then off I went! In 4 hours I managed to take 6 images, 3 of which were worth using and had a recognisable image on the paper. To develop the images on the paper, we had to go back into a dark room and remove the photographic paper from the box. We then placed the paper into a developer chemical, where images sometimes appeared, but for me it was very hit and miss. We then placed the picture into a fixer chemical, and then into water to clean off some of the chemicals. We then came back into our photography studio where we used the quick-drying machine to dry our images from the chemicals and water. And that was it! =D

Overall I found this rotation very enjoyable and a lot of fun as we had no idea whether it was going to work or not. I had a lot of fun over this week and am looking forwards to doing lots more photography in the future!