I found this website and YouTube video particularly helpful:
Justin Quinnell - Pinhole Photography
Tin Can Pinhole Camera
I spent the morning transforming our utility room into a dark room, meticulously taping over minute gaps in the boards I positioned over the windows and amassing knitwear to soak up the light creeping under the door (I do makeshift best). I searched the house, the attic and outside sheds for the right size/volume plastic storage boxes to use as trays, in which to put the darkroom chemicals, To summarise, it took me a LONG time to set up, and I was very excited to see my first image emerge in the darkness. To begin with I directed the pinhole through my taleidoscope. Well, this happened.... .
(I don't have a photo of it, but that last full stop shows everything you need to know) The most minute, disappointing blurry blemish appeared in the middle of a 5''x7'' piece of photo paper. Not all that inspiring.
The next attempts were somewhat more of a success...
These images are taken through my taleidoscope, a plastic bottle, a striped plastic cup (above) and a homemade kaleidoscope with stripes of black tape over the end (below). I was a little too nervous about making images through glasses lenses or contact lenses because I didn't want to waste the photo paper without having a better understanding of how the lenses would change the light through the pinhole first, whether to put the lens in front or behind the aperture. I only made a tin can camera and I think the lenses might work better with a box, where (I presume) the paper would be flat and collecting less information from all angles. Investigations need to be done...
Converse to the clarity of the lines, I also really like the ambiguity and the obscurity of viewing an image that is usually and indispensably connected to an object, and therefore a context. Although confusing and mesmerising, kaleidoscpe images make sense when they are viewed through a kaleidoscope - the process is accepted as part of the experience of viewing them. When the image is viewed alone in this way, it becomes more mysterious. Perhaps this could link with my recent ideas about how vision is linked culturally and historically with knowledge....to see is to know. As I have read in Simon Ings' 'The Science of Vision', how we visually perceive the world is reliant on context and the relationship between colours. Another strand of inquiry could be how removing the object and leaving the image is similar to how I began to remove the object from the plinths that I presented at the last assessment - leaving it to the caption and the viewer's imagination to make the work...I suppose this, really, is how all photographic works function.
My aim now is to try making more pinhole images, involving lenses and trying to link the images more directly and more personally to my interests in vision.
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