back to painting...

Whilst I have spent a lot of time on the pinhole camera over the last 2 weeks or so I have also tried to keep my hand in on painting....as this is what I am supposed to be doing. Therefore over the last couple of weeks I have continued to explore large format mark making. Experimental sessions led by Sylvia and Phillipa led to trying out scraping of paint from a coated surface while the admired work of John Virtue has led to 2 attempts at building definitions inspired by the different vanatage point of the pinhole work.

St Johns Cathedral ~ 1.7 metres x 1m

A childs eye view of a dark foreboding church against a dark ominous sky. Overtones of fear inferred by teh sharp railings pointing up to the same vanishing point as the steeple. One railing drawn out of alignment wrt the others to suggest something is wrong ......Would love to tackle some serious issues of the day such as clerical child abuse and need to keep this in mind as my insight develops over teh coming weeks,months,years.

A later attempt at mark making using teh same subject is as follows...20 mins work pushing paint around a pva treated paper surface before it dries in and becomes unworkable.

Only partially successful and need to learn how to do cloudy skies more realistically.

Further attempt with old man image turned out a little better....

Particularly happy with definition of lips,hair and general sombre tone. This aligns well with my pretty painting of the disused Georgian building...fronted by scaffolding. The commonality of both objects ignored and left alone, untended...waiting to die. Will try and place these together in the corner of exhibit to show linkage.

Like the OLD MAN - forgotten , ignored, waiting to die!

last few images

Composition including glass,mirror , magnifying glass etc against a black back drop. (in this case a dunnes stores shopping bag)

Glass surfaces catch light magnificently and reflection in mirror shows the camera itself as described in previous post. Enlargement of mirror frame due to magnifying glass is clear and the image is generally interesting to examine and decipher which a positive image would be  to a lesser degree.

Looking at the seeing things from a new perspective angle, which is the strengthy of this type of photography I used the camera in 2 more unusual spots to catch views you would normally ignore.

More successfully this glance along the centre of the bike rack in the back courtyard seems unworldly. When the image is placed back to back with a copy the similarity to an old celtic design is striking.

 The pair together....can be seen another time due to server problems.

View of Georgian disused buildings/disgrace in the middle of Limerick city centre.

Again , very large depth of focus adds interest to this view which would otherwise be out of focus and more distorted due to state of the art camera lenses.

what does pinhole camera look like and how do I make one.

A closer look at the pinhole camera

Pinhole Camera was created by simply cutting a large hole (~1cm diameter) in the lid of a black cardboard box. A pinhole is formed by poking a needle thru a thin strip of tin cut from an old coke can and attached to the cardboard box over the centre of the hole. Another strip of metal is used to act as a shutter to admit or prevent light to the box. This is attached by a piece of tape and manually opened and shut using some sort of adhesive tape.

1) Load photopaper into bottom of box and tape in safelight , darkroom conditions. (red light)

2) close box and tape down shutter to maintain true dark inside box.

3) go to subject and secure camera in a stable spot not liable to small movements due to wind, vibration from machines, passing people etc etc

4) remove shutter and expose paper to light coming thru pinhole.

5) after allocated exposure time / mins/hrs/days depending on lighting conditions and diameter of pinhole, reattach shutter.

6) return to darkroom and remove paper from box under safe-light conditions.

7) place paper in developer tray for 5 mins

8) transfer to stop bath for 2-5 mins

9) finally transfer to fixer bath for 15 mins prior to rinsing in water and drying paper in dedicated machine.

If you've fucked up anywhere along the way .....start again!

Numerous excellent websites can advise you on the ease and flexibility of pinhole camera work.

final ranking contd

Interesting shots of the largely unoccupied gallery as viewed from about 10 feet of the ground looking towards the chapel direction. The curved ceiling and arches complement the straight vanishing lines into the distance and the strong vertical lines of the unmanned easels. Being asymmetrical wrt room where the near wall disappears into the distance at a grazing angle is a nice contrast to the gentle more expansive information from the far wall.

The above image used a convex paper bend to compress the image towards the centre. The next image shows the uncompressed image produced on a 'flat' paper surface. It still works well but maybe loses a little impact.

EXPLORATION with addition of other traits...other than photoshop originated...

1) Printing thru cling film. ie stretching a thin sheet of crumpled cling film on top of the paper such that the light from the pinhole passes through the cling film before striking the paper. This worked reasonably well on images with lots of intermittent tone in that the cling film has no effect on bright white or dark areas.....ie high contrast images show little effect.

Cling film has been placed over the paper on the left hand-side of the image. The resultant ghostly effect may be appropriate for some images in the future as it does work remarakably well with mid-tone areas.

Though somewhat underexposed the following image shows that distinct highlights....(very little light penetration) can be created using the random folds of the cling film.

Attempts were made to develop the image in small puddles of developer bubble sprayed onto the paper....
This effect can be seen , but is really not that interesting to these subjects and there is the distinct problem of not knowing where the image is to apply this technique to key areas. Could be done though if was deemed crucial....takes planning.

Psychaedelic bubble type effect seen in dark to some degree but easily visible in mid-tone areas.

further pinhole work

A few more outdoor shots were taken using the heavier wooden box , smaller format, (~ 10cm x 15cm) as opposed to full 20 x 25cm of home-made device.

View from the back of the humt museum. 5 mins exposure time in strong sunlight. Blurring of boat in foreground is due to slow drifting back and forth in the water. Long exposure time eliminated short term appearances but only blurs very slow moving objects.

Negative and positive views of St Johns Cathedral taken from close to the foot. Again the remarakable depth of focus is clear to see.

Cool composition using the curve of the bannisters in the foreground to lead into the view of the car park in the midground and the park and trees in the background. The white tree foliage against the black sky is particularly striking. I think these images to train the eye as to what is important for image forming in terms of capturing the eye and interest of the viewer.

painting ranking - the story continues

Growing success with pinhole photography as skills in exposure time / aiming of camera and composition continue to improve. Inhibeited by the poor weather conditions most shots are indoors but I feel I have taken advantage of the pinhole camera's very large depth of focus which keeps everything in focus. This is in sharp contrast to a std high sepped exposure normal camera view where only the foreground or the background are in sharp focus....but not both. In many ways this is how our brains work in that it focusses on what is important at the time but does not process all of the information sent from the eyes.

It could be argued that pinhole or at least very small aperture (large depth of field) is a way of looking at our surropundings in a new more comprehensive way than is the norm.

Wooden Box camera - outdoors - 10 mins exposure.

As is often the case the negative raw image is more interesting than the resultant positive from post processing via photoshop. One can create positives by exposing a new sheet of paper thru the inverted negative paper image , but this is not very advantageous and I personally think negative is 'generally' more interesting causing you to stop and stare automatically to try and work out what is what. As well as being negative in terms of black and white the left to right swap can be confusing but in these examples remains uncorrected, largely thru laziness and reluctance to go for true repreesntation.

This is one of the initial successes. Strong light thru skylight dominates overhead but the clock and flasks on the wall are resolved reasonably clearly. This was taken as the initial subject on a cold windy day to evaluate the possible distortions of images via the photo paper bending...accepting the data from the pinhole.

This distortion , curvature of normal rectilinear 'flat' definition was acheived using convex paper bending with paper bent closest to the pinhole in the centre.

The convers 'concave' bending results in the following equivalent.

Again , in my opinion the 'negatives' from a more interesting view than the positives shown below.

NOTE - There is 'hairiness' of the edges of the image. This turned out to be the feathering of the carboard in the hole formed to take the pinhole formed in the small sheet of flattened tin. (piece cut from empty coke can).

This issue was resolved in later images by trimming back the edge of the cardboard further from teh active pinhole. (surprisingly long way ...but the pinhole does have a very wide angle view of the world).

ranking project - painting continued

Spent a lot of time looking into pinhole camera images and what they bring to the party wrt to standard camera based images and maybe how these differences could be used to inspire interesting views of objects.

Saw some work on the web in New York covering the key differences , in my opinion.

Use of pinhole cameras , gives the user almsot infinite depth of focus at the general cost of  significantly longer exposure times. (maybe not a 'cost or restriction' for many purposes. With a photographic paper 'negative' easy distortion of the resultant images is acheived by curving the receiving paper surface.

This exposure from Micheal Wesley shows the old MOMA building being demolished and the new one being built over an exposure time of some 34 months. Of course the proportional time of the completed new building and the rapidly demolished old building would be small and the overal sense is of change about a rigid skeleton due to fundamental beams / foundations of the building.

The easy manipulation of images , without photoshop can be shown in the following image from Michel Baryard of the Brooklyn Bridge, New york.

OK. So looks like fun. Built a simple camera from an old jigsaw box, capable of taking 8 x 10" photo paper before I discovered the availability of a custom-made wooden box from the photography dept.
Took a couple of days mesing around to get the feel for the exposure times and directionality, do's and dont's ...but ended up with some interesting images.