Wednesday, December 29, 2010

I need to stop thinking

Holy smokes.... I need to stop thinking for a minute or two. My brain is fried.
What is happening I hear you ask. Well it all started a couple of days ago when I showed my wife a solargraphy picture. You can see an example here. Sarah thought it would be a great idea to do so we can finally hang something behind our bed. I always wanted some contemporary art but I wanted to do something myself. Since I am no painter (O God don't arm me with a paintbrush) this solargraphy stuff is so low tech that even I can pull it off.
Being the researcher that I am I started thinking about pinhole camera's. And how to build them. It's pretty easy. After a lot of debating I will make 2 kinds of pinhole camera's. One 'regular' looking one – all though I will raise the pinhole above the middle of the camera (rise and fall remember, I want to show more sky than ground without distorting the trees or buildings) and one 'anamorphic' camera (or parallel cylinder camera). Each has it's own pros and cons. After some calculations (thanks to this website) I came up with this.

Regular pinhole camera
This camera gives you a nice wide angle view of your scene. Raising the pinhole rather than angling the camera upwards means that you 're keeping all your vertical lines vertical. It's technical camera 101 really but on a low tech basis.
I think I will make one with the pinhole in the middle as well and angle it towards the sky just as an alternative to this one.


Anamorphic pinhole camera
This type gives you a 360° field of view but is unable to 'see' the ground our the zenith. Makes really cool distorted photographs.




So I think over the weekend I will make maybe 5-6 camera's and start thinking about where to hang them. There is a lot of luck involved in this type of photography. You let those camera's hang in the elements for a few months and see what you come up with. It will be a surprise. But that is the fun part of it. I'll keep you updated.

2 comments:

  1. They're certainly cheaper than a Canon 5DmkII.

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  2. Haha Dan Yeah I know. One day I'm blogging about maximum amount of megapixels I can afford, the next I want to go back to old school DIY photography. Go figure....
    Thanks for reading!

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