Standing Inside of a Pinhole Camera

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camera obscura, photography, pinhole camera, whitney biennial 2014, whitney museum, zoe leonard

I went to the Whitney Biennial a few weeks ago, and this week I went back. There was one exhibit I had to see again, created by artist Zoe Leonard. It’s a camera obscura… and it’s the size of a room. You can stand inside of a pinhole camera with the image projected all around you! It’s amazing.

When you step into the room, it takes a minute for your eyes to adjust. Once they have, you realize that you’re completely surrounded by the projected image, which hits all of the walls. Sorry about the quality of these photos, I didn’t bring a tripod. The room is about 50 feet long with ceilings 20 feet high. Here’s the image on the back wall.

Here’s the view from the opposite side, now with people for scale. The projected image is upside down and flopped, as it always is in a camera.

So this is what’s happening: the room is a light-tight space; all surfaces are painted matte black. The only source of light is the pinhole that’s been created on the window. The light concentrates through this aperture, then projects the light reflected by the buildings across the street into the room, replicating the living, breathing, moving street scene outside.

Here’s a close up of the pinhole. It’s about six inches wide and four feet up from the floor. You’re seeing the view outside that’s being projected into the room.

This is what it looks like from the outside of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building.

These people are standing right in front of the pinhole, facing the image.

In this video below, on a little portion of the wall next to the pinhole, you can see the projected image well (remember, it’s upside down), and you can see the moving cars on the street below. It’s a pinhole movie! You might want to go full screen on this, the area in question is pretty small.

Many people think that in order to create a picture, you need a lens and a photosensitive surface. You don’t. You need light and a dark box. That’s it. This is just physics, and it works whether the space is the size of a walnut or the size of a room at the Whitney. It doesn’t matter if there’s film in there; there’s light, and that creates the image. The photosensitive surface just captures it; the image is there regardless. This is what all cameras do, but it’s magic to see it in action.

Here’s a link to info about the artist, Zoe Leonard, with brighter photos. This isn’t her first camera obscura.

The show’s up until May 25th. Run to this room! It’s on the 4th Floor. I sat in there forever, just staring. A once-in-a-lifetime experience! And only $20. What a thrill.

 

Pinhole Photography: Getting it in the Frame

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architecture, black and white, new york city, photography, pinhole, pinhole camera, plaza hotel, seagram building

One of the trickiest things to learn when shooting pinhole photos is how far away you need to be from your subject in order to get it in the frame. Part of this is understanding the relevance of the focal length of the camera, which is the distance from the lens (in this case, the actual pinhole, which allows light to enter the camera) to the focal point (in this case, the negative, a piece of photographic paper stuck inside the camera, opposite the pinhole).

The smaller the focal length becomes, the more the light has to bend for the image to come into focus on the negative. The more the light bends, the wider the angle of view becomes. So the shallower the pinhole camera, the greater the bend, and the wider the shot. Ergo, if you want to take a picture of something tall, use a shallow camera.

As you can see from the photo below, which chops off the entire top of the St. Jean Baptiste Church on Lexington Avenue while providing a fine photo of pavement, it took me a while to figure this out.

Again, gorgeous pavement! This is the Ralph Lauren building on the corner of Madison and 72nd and is less chopped off, but still too cropped. Another challenge of shooting on the street is finding a stable surface to put the camera on for 30-60 seconds, so the sidewalk is often the best solution, which results in low angles.

Sometimes I overcompensate and end up too far away.

Although the entire Park Avenue church below is in the frame, again, that sidewalk isn’t too attractive and the composition is a yawn. However, this is a good example to illustrate how in a pinhole photo, everything from the tiniest stone to a distant tower is in focus.

Okay, finally in the frame, nice balance with the foreground, but another glitch: the wind! So much for sharpness in this shot; one little gust and it’s all over.

Here I’m starting to get the hang of it. This is the jaw-dropping Ansonia apartment building on the Upper West Side and I’m about half a block away. Not crazy about the cars in the foreground, but pleased that the tower isn’t cut off.

Eventually, I realized that I would have better results with a shallower camera and built  one. The previous shots are taken with pinhole cameras that are about 4 x 5 inches (10 x 13 cm) with a depth of 2 inches (5 cm). My new camera was 3 x 6 inches (7.5  x 15 cm) with a depth of 1/2 of an inch (1.25 cm). Holy moly! What a difference.

The building below, on the corner of 66th and Madison, is one of my favorite Upper East Side prewar apartment houses, with a beautiful cylinder of windows creating the corner of the building. It’s ten stories high, and I’m straight across the street. The downside is that because the camera is so shallow, its exposure time is much shorter than my other cameras, often 10 seconds or less. This allows people to appear in the photos, instead of disappearing as they do in a longer exposure.

I thought it would be fun to try the ultimate test, a skyscraper. The subject is the gorgeous Seagram building on Park Avenue and 53rd, designed by the fabulous Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson in 1958. Yes, 1958! Hello, modernism! Such a fantastic building, and although it’s shot from partway down the block, the camera is on the ground and almost the entire building is in the frame. Look at the height! 38 stories tall measuring 516 feet, to be exact. The building next door made it all the way into the frame. Mission accomplished! To avoid those pesky pedestrians, I shot in the early morning on a weekend.

Of course there are days when I’m not in the mood to fuss and I use that old tried and true method of making sure something’s in the frame: just back up. Here’s the lovely Plaza Hotel, shot from Gapstow Bridge in Central Park.

August’s Portrait: On the Job

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black and whtie, new york city, photography, pinhole, pinhole camera, portrait

This is the only successful pinhole portrait I’ve ever taken. It’s a photo of me with two of my painting assistants, Sanja and Alana, as we sat out on the sidewalk one day eating our lunch. We were sitting next to the apartment building that we were working in, surrounded by street construction equipment and barricades.

This photo is an example of how context changes everything. On the surface, this is a straightforward picture of three women, sitting outside on a sunny day, playing with a pinhole camera. But there’s more to the story. The photo was shot on September 18, 2001. One week earlier, the twin towers fell as we worked here together. We watched the unthinkable unfold on a television set in the apartment before we swiftly packed up and went our separate ways. Three days later, we reconvened and continued the job.

Look at the photo again. Does it seem any different now? Maybe yes, maybe no. For me, that pinhole photo, Sanja, Alana and that apartment are forever tied to 9/11. Looking at the photo today, I notice how tightly we’re sitting together.

This photo reminds me that when I look at art and say to myself, “That’s not very interesting,” I’m not serving myself or the art well. It’s almost always worthwhile to have the curiosity and patience to learn more about what I’m looking at, to find out if there’s a story behind the image and to try to understand what the artist is saying. Sometimes it makes no difference at all. At other times, it makes all the difference in the world.

Pinhole Portfolio: The Lady Vanishes

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black and white, central park, landscape, new york city, photography, pinhole, pinhole camera

I love pinhole photography because of the complete lack of technical gadgetry. I’m out shooting with a cardboard box, how much simpler can it get? When I started, I wanted to understand light, to be able to take a good look around, think about the level of sun, cloud, haze and reflection, and figure out the exposure time without using a light meter or other tools.

The learning curve was steep. Eventually I got the hang of it, but I also discovered that portions of the scene in front of me would vanish due to overexposure, resulting in a photo of a landscape that didn’t actually exist. I liked that!

Here’s what I mean. All of these photos were shot in Central Park, which of course is surrounded by buildings. This is the Lake, looking toward the skyscrapers beyond Central Park South. Really? It looks like upstate New York to me.

Here’s the Lake again, shooting north from the opposite shore. Such serenity! Look, a building has appeared… but only as a reflection.

Here’s a favorite, shot on top of Umpire Rock after a heavy rain. The buildings of Central Park South seem to have jumped into the puddle.

This photo is shot in the Ramble, one of the Park’s thickly wooded areas, but you wouldn’t think so, from these sparse tree trunks. All of the trees in the background disappeared. That’s the Gill, an artificial stream that feeds the Lake, frozen during the winter.

This next one is completely blasted out, and has taken everything with it — the lake, the opposite shore, the buildings — leaving this lone tree in its wake.

And to finish, the photo that showed me this phenomenon in the first place. We’re on the Lake again, and only one of the tall residential buildings on Central Park West has appeared, with the illustrious towered buildings surviving as mere reflections.

Art and Perseverance

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american museum of natural history, architecture, black and white photography, cityscape, natural history museum, new york city, photography, pinhole, pinhole camera, pinhole photography

Recently, a fellow blogger introduced me to podcasts by Brooks Jensen of LensWork Daily, a photography website. My favorite podcast was about perseverance. It made me think about the number of shots it takes to get a good pinhole photo and the number of times I revisit a particular location until the stars align and a decent negative emerges. Of course people see only the final shot, not the trial and error leading up to it. Here’s what happened when I shot the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. Photo above: two of my battle-scarred pinhole cameras.

First try: February 3, 8:00 a.m., 60 second exposure. Way too far away.

Second try: February 3, 8:05 a.m., 35 second exposure. Whoops! Too close and too low.

Third try: February 3, 8:10 a.m., 10 second exposure. Can’t really see what’s going on here. Try the south side of the museum next time.

February 10, 1:30 p.m., 35 seconds. South side now. Getting better, but still  too far away. Like the branches coming into the photo, though.

Fifth try: February 10, 1:35 p.m., 10 second exposure. Nice! But the rest of the museum has disappeared in the distance.

Sixth try: February 10, 1:45 p.m., 60 second exposure. Hallelujah! A little dark on the right, but I like the mysterious mood.

Here’s the final image for display, which is finished with 4-5 coats of tinted varnish and sanded back, then trimmed out and floated in a window in an 8-ply mat. The edges of the photo curl up a bit, like a tintype. This pinhole is 4 x 5 inches.

The podcast is no longer on iTunes for some reason, so I can’t pass on the link, but this part of it hit home: “You never know how to do it right until you’ve done it the second time, and so almost anything you do you’re going to have to do at least twice in order to get a learning curve under your belt. One of the things that frustrates some of the people who are not successful in the arts, who give up being artists, painters, photographers, poets, whatever: they think they should be able to create something out of genius. Genius is not the most important criteria to be a successful artist. Perseverance is way more important than genius for the simple reason that you will have to do it over and over and over and over again in order to get it done right. That’s just the nature of the beast and the minute we try to bypass that, we invariably allow ourselves to accept less than our best work.”

Here’s the link to the LensWork Daily podcasts, where you’ll find a series of short podcasts about Structure and the Creative Life. Although the ideas are expressed in terms of photography, they apply to any art making.