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These notes accompany the interactive Photograph online workshop (Flash reburied). Introduction LIGHT is a magical and mysterious medium. Everything that has been dealt with on this site has been aimed at highlighting ways to harness and explore the incredible properties that light and its associated twin of darkness or shadow carries with it, especially through the medium of PHOTOGRAPHY. Photography can be used for a whole range of purposes. It functions as art, as advertising, as illustration, but for most of us is a way of capturing and recalling memories. Though grounded in science, photography is more than a physical process. It is a cocktail of light and chemicals, a form of alchemy and a constant source of surprise. It can be about capturing a moment in time that can never be reconstructed, but is also abstract and unquantifiable. The aim throughout
has been to keep the workshops as LOW-TECH as possible. Not only is this
cheaper than other methods of photography it also encourages EXPERIMENTATION.
Many of these ideas explore non-traditional techniques or offer an exploration
of methods of photography often taken for granted such as the snapshot.
Some of the techniques involve cameras, including handmade pinhole cameras
and whole rooms as cameras as in the case of a camera obscura. Other methods
don't involve cameras at all such as sun pictures and Photograms that
work directly with light and photographic paper. In addition, the site
offers practical advice including setting up a basic darkroom and making
test All the work here
is based on black and white processes and results. So much pleasure can
be gained in seeing the cast shadow of an object or the light of the moon
against a black sky, the striking contrast of white against black or the
subtle silvery greys of light-dappled pavements. No doubt there is a whole
lifetime's work also to be found in colour but the aim here is to highlight
the pleasure to be found in tone, contrast, SHADOW and LIGHT. Snapshot & Narrative Rummaging though an old chest of drawers, a box, or even the family album will probably reveal some photos of people your are close to. Nevertheless, many family photographs are a different class from snapshots. They are celebration photos staged and carefully set up to commemorate an event like a birthday, or a wedding. The snapshot proper has an unstaged feel to it. The subject, or at least one of the subjects, is not fully aware of the photo being taken. Producing true 'snaps' requires a kind of wasteful attitude. Try shooting a whole film away on a subject. By being wasteful your 'victim' will soon become tired of posing! Try and take photos of children, or animals who might be less aware of your action. Or get a friend to
agree that you can record him/her in an activity which requires concentration
or engagement with other things. Good occasions are parties, group gatherings,
working on something practical or manual like gardening, sports... Camera Obscura Camera Obscura comes from the Latin "camera" meaning room, and "Obscura" meaning dark. A Camera Obscura is literally a dark room, in which you limit the amount of light coming from the outside. This limited light throws an image of the outside world onto the wall of the darkened room. Bathrooms often make ideal camera obscura as do bedrooms. The room you choose needs to:
If you use a bathroom make sure that the glass is not frosted. If the glass is frosted, make sure that you can open the window fully to allow the light in cleanly. Whichever room you decide to use, follow the steps below:
The panoramic view of your window should appear magically on the opposite wall of the room - upside down however! The light might be obscure and fuzzy - depending on the size of hole you've cut. If it doesn't work, check that you've taped the dustbin liner tightly to the frame and that not much light escapes through the seams. Make sure it is daylight outside! If you have a larger window which cannot easily be covered with dustbin liners, you could use black thin cardboard cut to size to cover the area. Use a two-penny piece as a guide and cut out hole with surgical knife. Tape the board to the frame avoiding light pollution. Check doors and other light sources are not interfering. In principle you have created a camera here! Camera is the Latin word for room, but we tend to associate photography with it now. If you scale down your Camera Obscura to a table-top model you will in principle have a small camera! The pinhole camera is a small Camera Obscura. Pinhole camera How to construct a pinhole camera. A pinhole camera is a small, light-tight box with a black interior and a tiny hole in the centre of one end. A piece of photographic paper is placed inside the box, at the opposite end of the box to the hole. Light is prevented from entering the box through the pinhole by a small cover, so that you can control when and for how long the paper is exposed. A lot of different objects can be converted into pinhole cameras: tins, boxes, tubes, handbags, even washing machines have been used! Your mouth could become an aperture, and your throat could form the camera... if you wanted! To make a simple but effective pinhole camera try the following steps:
Loading a pinhole To load your pinhole camera with photographic paper you will need a darkroom. This need not be a professional darkroom - instead you can create your own - see "Making a darkroom" on the Photograph resource at www.accessart.org.uk/photograph
It should now be OK to take your camera outside into daylight. Taking a photograph
with pinhole Either weigh down the box with a stone or tape the box to an object if windy. The camera mustn't shake (else the results will be very blurry!). Exposure times can be very long. Depending on what time of the day it is, on average if the day is sunny and bright you will need to expose your paper (film) for about half to one minute. If the day is cloudy, overcast or it is the evening the exposure time might need to be extended to eight or ten minutes. You might have to adjust these times after you've developed your first negative depending on the outcome. Alternatively you might want to increase hole if images come out very underexposed. Make notes with each photograph you take so that you can learn from each image. When you are ready to take the photograph, carefully peel off the black tape from your pinhole camera (open the shutter!). Tape up the pinhole carefully when you think you have exposed the paper long enough to image and light. Be careful not to nudge your camera as you do this. Take the box back to the darkroom. Use only a red/safe light now. Developing a pinhole negative Set up your developing tray, stop bath, fixer and water prior to this so that everything is ready. Open the pinhole camera and carefully take out the paper - avoid touching the emulsion side. Drop the paper into the developer, shiny side facing you. You can use tongs (from photoshop supplier) or adapt kitchen tools, but make sure you have use different tongs for each tray. The developer should expose your negative within a minute - if the photo becomes black really fast (i.e. within seconds) you have overexposed your image. You might as well stop now and start all over again placing a fresh paper in your camera and retaking another photo with less exposure. Restrict your exposure times - perhaps half the time: if you have used a minute exposure previously, try 30 seconds now. If your image does not appear at all or is only very faint you have underexposed it. Start again at this point, and place a fresh paper in the box, increase size of pinhole or expose for much longer. A good negative should show some contrast and should develop within a minute. Remove the negative from developer and drop in the stop bath. 30 seconds to one minute should be sufficient, but check with the instructions on your chemicals: these times vary considerable depending on supplier of chemicals!. Using clean tongs (don't contaminate liquid in trays!) remove from stop bath to third tray: fix. Fix for 30 seconds to one minute. Remove from Fix tray with clean tongs and drop your negative into a bucket of water. Ideally this bucket should have a supply of running water, i.e. a tap feeding a dribble of fresh water into it, and overflow possibilities (bath or sink), but it is possible to rinse negatives and positives in a bucket of still water - just change water frequently if you have a lot of images going in. Average rinsing time will be four to eight minutes per photo or negative, but if you leave it in the water for much longer no harm will be done. Your image may not stay stable if you do not rinse it long enough. Once sufficiently
rinsed, hang the negative up to dry - you can use a washing line and wash
pegs or other arrangements - use your imagination. At this point you can
expose your photo safely to day light. Making a darkroom To create a temporary, low cost darkroom: Follow instructions as if creating a Camera Obscura - i.e. black-out a room. Your bathroom might be a good place for this. Make sure everything is really light-tight this time. You need to purchase a red light or a safe light from a photographic shop or specialist supplier. Or else you can try using a red bike light. Photographic paper is not sensitive to red light. Or you can teach yourself to work in total darkness (not a good idea!). You'll need an enlarger for many photographic methods. Try looking for a cheap second hand one. Purchase three plastic chemical trays or convert existing material. You also need to get trial sizes of Developing liquid, Stop Bath and Fixer. You might want to buy some tongs. Buy some photographic paper - buy the cheapest for experimentation or whatever your supplier has on offer. Sometimes you can find deals which give away free paper with chemicals, and you can spend less than £10 - so it's worth shopping around. Dilute chemicals according to supplier's instructions. You will need running
water or at least a generous bucket with water. You might want to put
a flat board on the bath to create a works surface - especially if your
bathroom is tight. If you convert another room maker sure you have a sturdy
level table-top available to put your trays on and place large bucket
of water in safe place within arms reach. Contact printing Any photograms (or indeed any photograph) can be tonally reversed using contact printing. For further experiments transforming positives into negatives and vice-versa see the 'Translations'. You will need:
Method: 1. Place a sheet of
paper on the bench Photograms Photograms are, very simply, compositions of objects placed in direct contact with the photographic paper. They are sometimes called shadow pictures because the trace of the object is like a permanent 'shadow'. Images go through the same procedures a 'normal' photograph would go through in the darkroom: developer tray, stop bath, fixer and wash. The more dense or opaque the object (e.g. keys) the more contrast and more clearly defined the result. Beautiful effects can also be produced by using objects which are semi-transparent or translucent, such as pressed flowers or glass. You will need:
* if you don't have access to an enlarger you can experiment with an angle-poise lamp with a 100 watt bulb positioned as close as possible over the photographic paper Method: 1. Firstly decide
on your design on a piece of ordinary paper Sun Pictures Sun pictures are made by arranging objects directly onto a piece of photographic paper and exposing them to the sun. Some of the earliest photographic experiments were produced using a similar method by William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins as far back as the 1830s. Lunar graphs, i.e. pictures made from the light of the moon, could also be made, although much longer exposure times would be necessary for these. Although they share similarities, the difference between sun pictures and photograms is that to produce sun pictures you don't need an enlarger. Also the results produced have a violet or sometimes bluish tint rather than being black and white. You will need:
Method: 1. Firstly decide
on your design on a piece of ordinary paper 5. Leave exposed to
the sunlight until the paper has turned a deep colour. (Don't be alarmed
if the paper becomes very dark very quickly - it will fade again later
in the chemicals.) Leave for anything between 30 seconds and 30 minutes
depending on the strength of the sun, although 3 - 5 minutes in fairly
bright sunlight is a good starting point. |
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