]twenty-six paces[ : What the Room Saw Part II

8/13/2011 8 mins

In a previous post, I mentioned creating pinhole camera prints from the vantage of the two points anchoring the tin can telephone in both Artisan Wine Shop and Beacon Pilates.  Angelika and I exposed two sets of prints on two recent Saturdays.  Last weekend, we finally got a peek at the results.

8/13/2011 8 mins

Angelika treated me to a basic developing lesson in the darkroom at Fovea.  It was something new for me, but also something very familiar.  It was like was channeling all those memories of darkroom scenes from movies and tv.  It was a real Greg Brady moment.  I seem to remember at least one episode of the Brady Bunch (turns out it's an episode called "Click" from season 3) in which Greg sets up a darkroom in the bathroom.  I have retained a vague yet vivid image of that red tinted scene and even as I try to remember all the times I've seen similar scenes in movies and tv shows, Greg Brady's version is for in my mind.

Above is a re-enactment of Angelika developing the pinhole prints in Fovea's darkroom....just imagine this scene happening when the lights are off.  It's the first time I had been in a darkroom like this and I was impressed by how much one's eyes are able to adjust so well and how functionally visible everything was in there with just that little bit of red illumination.   

The cameras: Mabby 1 (right) and Mabby 2 (left)

The two sets of exposures made in August were short, 8 and 12 minutes.  Today I took I took another set of exposures of an hour in length.  Hopefully there will be much more information visible in the Beacon Pilates view.

8/20/2011 12 mins

8/20/2011 12 mins

I really love that creating an exposure with a pinhole camera is such a dumb, passive process - and one that is so receptive of the chance occurrance.  You just set it somewhere, open the lens and let it go.  It's a chance operation in a box.  It's not just  a bit magical either; a very lo-fi replication of how our eyes function.
In this case, I'm using 5"x7" black and white paper for a negative.    The rich blackness, particularly in the underexposed prints is pretty great - even if not as detail laden as hoped.
The point in pursuing this as part of the ]twenty-six paces[ project was to capture a moment in time in the relationship of these two locations to one another.  Ideally, two simultaneous views along that line I articulated with Telephone.  That the representational aspect of this action is not entirely reliable adds to it for me - allows for something else to seep in.
I'm hooked.  I plan to continue taking shots, and hopefully incorporating this form of image making into the overall process of my work.
I've named these two cameras Mabby 1 and Mabby 2, loosely after my twin nieces.  I expect to make more and perhaps explore the sculptural possibilities of the cameras themselves.  There are certainly some very innovative constructions of pinhole cameras.