skylight / camera obscura

eas

cool to see one of our skylights transform into a camera obscura this afternoon. Helped the hangover along nicely.

dazftw

I did one of these awhile ago..



Id love to set one up somewhere that had a great view. I cant find the link but a guy did one around New York City. It was really good.


They're actually amazing when you 1st do them.

GhostInTheRuins

That is class!

artyeva

may i be so bold as to ask - how big is the hole?

Fajitas!

dazftw wrote: »

Id love to set one up somewhere that had a great view. I cant find the link but a guy did one around New York City. It was really good.

If it's the same guy I'm thinking of, he painted the whole opposite side of the room with liquid emulsion and only opened the 'shutter' once a day at the same time for a week, so he got a huge print of the city across the wall. Looks pretty beautiful.

dazftw

artyeva wrote: »

may i be so bold as to ask - how big is the hole?

The bigger the whole the more light you let it. When I did it I started small and made it bigger. Its basically the same idea as an aperture. Just keep making it bigger until it looks right.

Fajitas! wrote: »

If it's the same guy I'm thinking of, he painted the whole opposite side of the room with liquid emulsion and only opened the 'shutter' once a day at the same time for a week, so he got a huge print of the city across the wall. Looks pretty beautiful.

No I don't think its the same guy.. but im curious to see how these prints look on the wall..

Fajitas!

Lovely, big, soft inverted and upside-down skyscrapers, no distortion, no real sharpness, so it was quite impressionistic. The rest of the office's furniture was in varying tones of grey to match the wall.

artyeva

there was a guy on grand designs too, with the bauld kevin - he was a photographer iirc, and built a camera obscura in part of his house. think he was in london?

how small did you start? like a 1c coin size?

Neasha

**** guys thats great.

PopeBuckfastXVI

How do you focus, or is it focused anywhere, and the image just gets bigger the further away it is?

DaireQuinlan

PopeBuckfastXVI wrote: »

How do you focus, or is it focused anywhere, and the image just gets bigger the further away it is?

It's effectively a pinhole camera, so it's in focus everywhere, and gets larget (and fainter) the further away from the pinhole you project the image.

you guys are probably thinking at least in part, of Alberdo Morell ...

http://www.abelardomorell.net/photography/cameraobsc_49/cameraobsc_49.html

Though I think he actually took photographs of the resulting scenes, don't think he used emulsion to get a permanent image.

Though actually, looking at his site again, I'm wondering how he did these ...

http://www.abelardomorell.net/photography/recent_01/recent_03.html
http://www.abelardomorell.net/photography/recent_01/recent_04.html
http://www.abelardomorell.net/photography/recent_01/recent_05.html

Gorgeous series, but they're not inverted

humberklog

By putting ledns glass on the opening then that'l turn it the right way around. Apparently tricky...never tried it myself.

There's just nothing like watching the images appear as your eyes adjust. I think the whole experience teaches you an awful lot about the very basic ingredient we use: light.

magicbastarder

yeah, the manhattan bridge stuff looks odd, because the viewpoint appears so close to the bridge.
did i hear that morell used to paper the rooms with photographic paper and take a print in 3D which would only look right if you reassembled the paper in the right way and stood at a particular point?

chicken_food

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good how to for this - it looks like it would yield some entertaining results in my new apartment

Effects

Get some decent black plastic bags, ones that are fully opaque. Then get some decent tape to tape them over you windows to block all light coming into the room. Then cut a small hole in the black bag to let the light in and onto the opposite wall. The lighter the colour of the wall the better.

irish147

camera obscura is very easy to setup, and it looks amazing.....