Another pinhole photograph from the small chapel on top of the hill in Indian Lake County Park northwest of Madison. It’s a wonderful park with lots of great trails, one leading to the small hilltop chapel built by a German Immigrant in 1857. Small is an understatement, three people in there would be crowded. I just love the peaceful setting surrounded by huge old oak trees.
Yes, That’s right. A pinhole camera made entirely out of duct tape and the small metal aperture for the pinhole. Nothing else.
What did I learn while spending two days on this project? Duct tape is not the IDEAL material to make a camera, but it does work after a lot of tinkering! I kind of like the image that came out of it. The main problem I had was in the 90 degree heat the camera kept sagged during setup and the three minute exposure. After three trips up to Owen Conservation Park this is finally what I came up with.
You may be looking at the first image ever created with a duct tape camera!
Attaching the duct tape camera to the tripod wasn’t something I thought about at the start of the project. I do have an idea for an improved “tripod head”. But that will have to wait till another day. Today rubber bands and more duck tape did the trick.
A before and after. Take a roll of duck tape, a metal aperture and a piece of film and a day later you have a camera. In the background of the “after” photo is one of my first failed attempts at a round camera. Even though I rolled the first part of the tape on the tubing mould backwards I could never get the duct tape off the tube. Then I moved on to the square idea.
It felt a little like the movie “Ground Hog Day” going back to the Capitol every morning last week to take pinhole photos of the interior of the dome. It took several takes to dial things in. The low light makes the exposures long and I also made another wider camera to get more of the dome in the photo.
The Capitol police all got to know the weird guy with the cigar box camera. I was honestly a little worried about hanging out in the Capitol with strange taped up boxes, but only one of the security personnel questioning me and what I was up to. One surprisingly came up and asked if it was a pinhole camera.
I’m not used to taking an entire week to produce two photographs but here are the results.
This is the wider shot. The four circles in the corners of the photograph are the four galleries going off the main rotunda. So it’s wide!
At first glance you would never think Clyde Butcher, who is often called the Ansel Adams of the Everglades, created this wall clock. Clyde’s black and white landscapes have made him a household name in Florida and he is becoming increasingly known nationwide and worldwide.
I’ve always been fascinated with the path artists take to get to the final destination. For obvious reasons- I’m still relatively new to the art world and of course searching for my own path. While Staying with Clyde and Niki Butcher last winter while doing an art show in Venice, FL they were telling me all about all their crazy stories back when they were doing art shows. When they told me at one time they had a large clock making business with photographs taken by Clyde on them I said I have to find one of them! After a lot of searching on eBay, sure enough I found one and now I’m the proud owner of an awesome piece of Clyde Butcher history.
I asked Niki to write a brief history of the kitten clock…
“During the 1970’s Clyde owned a business hat produced his color photography into “photo-clocks” that we’re sold in the wall decor departments of major dept stores across the country. He had 200+ employees, a manufacturing plant in both Santa Ana, Calif & Akron, Ohio. He became the largest clock manufacturer in our country.
The concept was to photograph images that sold…generic stuff. Kittens sell. Clyde is allergic to cats & dogs, so he went to a pet store & rented a kitten to photograph. Our daughter, Jackie, fell in love with the kitten & wanted to keep it. When Clyde returned the kitten to the pet store, Jackie was very upset.”
To learn more about Clyde Butcher and his amazing large format black and white photography visit his web site at http://www.clydebutcher.com/
Here’s another shot from the Brownie camera. I was experimenting with a new “organza filter” (literally organza fabric) I like the look, but not sure the subject and texture really work together. More photos to come next week hopefully.
This is kind of an oops moment, but is actually something that could be a fun thing to explore. I was intending to do a wide shot of the capitol steps, but the 4×5 sheet film fell out of place in the cigar box “camera”. The film fell to the bottom of the camera and was leaning against the back of the camera, so I got some extreme tilt and shift going. This is a strait pinhole photo without an filter applications.
There hasn’t been an art show yet that someone hasn’t walked in my booth and asked me “So what do you shoot with?” I can’t wait to answer. “I shot this with a cigar box.”
This is another photograph taking on the “you must have a nice camera” misconception. I took things to the extreme here and didn’t use a camera or a lens at all, this is a pinhole photograph.
A pinhole camera is basically any light tight box with a sheet of film inside and a small aperture in the side of the box to let light in to expose the film. In this case a cigar box with a sheet of 4×5 black and white film. It sounds easy, and in theory it is, but I’ve spent 3 days getting this to work. I kind of like the look. I’m going to spend some more time on this!
Here is the camera, shown with the “shutter” open. The shutter is gaffer tape. The lens is a thin sheet of stainless with a small hole drilled in it. I also added a tripod mount with some super glue to the bottom being exposure times are at least 30 seconds in full sun. The above photo was 4 minutes.
