Well, today we pulled two of the cameras off Erika and Mark's roof on the seafront and decided to take a look inside.
Luckily the evil seagulls were not in evidence and retrieving the cameras was fairly simple using my handy pocket knife. I squirrelled them into a bag and descended to meet Mike McLean who was waiting to whisk us to a darkroom.
I think it is fair to say that I honestly expected nothing at all to come out on this first run. I know we had Simon guiding us with the size of pinhole, and I know other people have done solargraphy before using the same equipment, still, I didn't quite believe that it would work!
So when the first camera was opened and we could see the dark lines of the sun trails, I was pretty darned pleased! Having said that, it all looked rather faint, and if there was anything else in the image it was certainly not jumping out at us.
We knew that the images would be sensitive to light and degrade fairly quickly, so our initial capture was using a digital camera to simply take a shot of the solargraph. Here are the photos we took in the darkroom.
 |
| The coke can facing south west |
 |
| The film Cannister facing west |
As you can see the rest of the image is pretty faint, although I'm not sure that photographic paper actually gets very dark even after exposure in full sun... Another thing to try!
Our next step was to do a more controlled digital shot and then to scan them.
Setting up for a digital photograph was actually quite tricky. We set up with a tripod and pre-set the focus and exposure, then quickly popped the solargraph up for a couple of seconds, grabbed a few shots and then put it back in the darkbag. I have to say we did this in daylight with the curtains closed but next time I would work at night.
Then we scanned them, which was much more practical, although you could see some serious darkening and visible degradation by the time we had finished.
Both Mike and I worked on the solargraphs, inverting the shot to get a positive image and making the best we could of them in Photoshop and Lightroom. The strangest thing is that the images come out in colour. From black and white paper. Very odd. And quite beautiful.
The larger image is the first of three coke can cameras facing South West, towards the Palace Pier. Something seems to have obscured the image in the top left corner and we have speculated on what this might be, from a curl in the paper itself (not evident when we opened the camera) to a salt grain formed very near the pinhole aperture. We will see if the rest of the cameras facing that way have the same problem.
 |
| Coke can pinhole solargraph looking south west towards the pier |
The smaller image is from a film cannister, facing due West into the setting sun. I think it is quite interesting how little the field of view has changed with a 45 degree change in angle. This one showed more pronounced colours.
 |
| Film cannister pinhole solargraph looking west |
We are immensely pleased to have recovered two amazing images already. I guess we have to wait another two months for the next ones!
No comments:
Post a Comment