I have had lots of fun over the year collecting photos of different things and editing them to suit my needs for the AS course. My eldest son (who is 4) and I have had some lovely trips out to different places to take images to use, so much so, he has his own sketch book to keep his photos in.
I have now completed the assessments and work has been moderated so along with keeping my fingers crossed for my students, I am also hoping for a good grade myself. This has given me a bit of time to think about what I might like to do as the next unit to complete the A2 year of the course.
After much Internet searching and thinking about what I would like to try, I have decided to go back to basics and make my own cameras. In my search I cam across this website http://www.pinholephotography.org/
This has some really interesting stuff on it, and I had no idea how easy it would be to make a pinhole camera and set it up. After collecting the required items (the right photo paper being the most difficult to find) and asking my flyball team mates to keep hold of their empties for me to collect I was ready to make the cameras.
So with the video instructions written down and a good idea about how to create the basic camera I began.
Part way through and the lid is made, and all seems to be going well, I am winning the battle against the gaffa tape that wants to stick me to everything else in the house. And the battle with the children who keep running off with different items every time they visit the table to see what is going on. Loading the paper was interesting as I didn't want to expose it to much light, but as it is spending at least 6 month being exposed to the outside world a few seconds to get it in place in the can was not going to cause too much damage.
And here is the finished camera, all ready to roll. I am setting one up at home as my test one with others going up as I make them over the next few weeks. The idea is to catch a long exposure over 6 months with the paper recording the light movement to give some interesting results. It is a fantastic experiment as I have no idea what the images are going to turn out like as the camera is exposed 24/7 for 6 months tracking daylight and night time.
Here are the cameras set up in the test locations, fingers crossed that the one on the bridge does not get removed (I have put a note on it to explain what it is doing). The final challenge of setting up the cameras was to get them attached, I bought some super long cable ties, which were still not long enough unless I doubled them up and used a bit of string to keep it steady!
The idea for the project is to study long exposure photography using my own digital camera and comparing the results from the pinhole camera, using the same locations where possible. Fingers crossed....
