Dominick Tyler - Pinhole Office
One episode of the recent, brilliant, "Genius of Photography" series began with a magical sequence. A group of people set to work blacking out an ornately decorated room. When every chink of light is extinguished a man cuts a small hole in the black plastic over one of the windows and suddenly the whole room becomes a ghostly mirror of the scene outside, a venetian canal as it turns out, complete with vaporetti and gondolas gliding silently across the ceiling. This, of course, is a camera obscura.
I've seen camera obscuras before, I remember visiting one in Edinburgh as a child and being a bit non-plussed, but something about the sequence in Venice did impress me. I think the idea of turning a normal room in to a camera (a joke there for the latin scholars?) was what appealed, and so, yesterday, armed with duct tape and sheets, I set about turning my office into a camera obscura.
The image on the left is the light coming through the 1/2 inch diameter hole that I cut in my blind. The projected image on the right wasn't particularly bright, but with the help of a digital camera and a 30sec exposure you get a pretty good idea of the scene outside my office window (I flipped it over in case you were wondering).
No gondoliers, but it was a bit magical.
Here's how to make a more sophisticated version with a lens.
And if you're asking yourself what this has to do with photojournalism take a look at Abelardo Morell's recent work, which, I think, is certainly a kind of photojournalism. Discuss.
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