Long Exposure Photography Experiment One

After the success of the Pinhole Cameras it was time to try out long exposure using my digital camera. Before the first attempt I can't begin to tell you about the number of websites that I visited to read up on it and to also purchase the right equipment to get the best results.

Anyway, I tested out the equipment from the location of the seconds pinhole camera that looks out over the local motorway. I should say that at 3pm this motorway is very busy and the result made it look like a ghost road! I am wondering whether I should explore this branch of photography further and going into town when it is busy and get some "ghost" town shots.

A fantastic, and great way to test out the camera and the settings that I had carefully selected. Onto the next test.....

Second test of the day was to capture the changing of the sky as the sun was setting. I adjusted the settings slightly to factor in the changing of the light and conditions, who knew that I would be using Maths and Science to take photographs! So......here is the result, and again I am really pleased as it shows the motion of how the clouds move across the sky and the colours developing over time.

Next test it to try and capture water.....

Pinhole Cameras - Experiment Two

After the success of the first camera I decided to take a trip up to the second pinhole camera I had set up and see if it had worked. The first image is the original scan from the photographic paper straight from the camera. I was really excited to see that the image contained the light trail in the sky, which was what I had been hoping for after seeing some examples on other websites.

This is the image after the invert had been applied to the original, and it shows the light trail in the sky even more, and it has highlighted some of the details of the road which was really pleasing.

The next idea I had was to play with the photo editing software to see if I could alter the colours further using the hue and saturation settings, I also played with the brightness and contrast to see what other results I could get out of the image. I am pretty happy with the result, I was surprised with the colours in the sky that appeared, however, I did have to be careful when adding the editing so not to remove the details of the original image.

I am really excited about the results that I have been getting from the pinhole cameras, and these are only after 2 months of being up at the locations. I will be leaving the others out for longer. Fingers crossed they will still be there when I go to collect them! 

The original cameras are now reloaded with new paper and ready to go, along with 3 more that my son and I made earlier today. Just got to find some interesting locations!

Pinhole Cameras Experiment One.....

It has been approximately 8 weeks since I put the first Pinhole Camera up at home as a test run to see if I had got the design right and whether the paper would work with the truly awesome weather we have in the North-West.

After taking down the camera, I realised that I needed to move fairly quickly to ensure that the scan was done swiftly so not to expose the image to much light in the transfer from the camera to the scanner. However, I discovered that getting the paper out of the can in one quick movement was not as easy as I thought it was going to be, and after a few frantic seconds I managed to place it soon the scanner, fingers crossed that I had not damaged the image. Upon placing the paper onto the scanner we realised (husband roped in at this point) that it did not want to scan without a preview first, big no, no when doing this kind of scanning. 

A quick changing of settings into "Professional" mode and we were off, with the scan taking the best part of 5 minutes as we put it on the highest settings to capture a decent image, and yes - the image is massive, 25% and it fills more than the whole of my screen.

Here is the original scan:

We were both impressed with the detail that had been captured by the camera in the short space of time.

Here is the final image, it has been inverted so it gives the illusion that it has been processed, however, this is a much easier method than using all the chemical to actually develop the photograph paper. I am really looking forward to collecting the other cameras that we have put up, and I need to make some more. 

I am really happy with how this experiment has turned out, big smiley face, the adventure with Pinhole Cameras continues.......