You might have seen the recent video we did for The Viewfinder series on Adorama TV. If you didn’t – check it out over here. I would like take it up a notch and show you a camera obscura that can make a much bigger impact and is even easier to make.
To turn one of your rooms into camera obscura, you will first need black opaque material and some masking tape. Black plastic bags are possibly the cheapest and most flexible option, especially if you have small or not too numerous windows. They are however not the only material that can be used and anything that does not allow the light to pass through will work just as well, or sometimes even better. In terms of alternative materials, I found black felt to be fantastically effective. It’s just a matter of few pieces of tape and it will turn any room into darkness. Things like other black fabric or black plastic sheeting will work quite efficiently as well.
Let’s start from the beginning: you must consider light. Just like with any other type of photography, light is a very important factor and the best time for this project, in particular, is a bright sunny day. The reason for this is that we will be letting light into a completely blacked out room through a very small hole, about 1X1cm, which means that there is very limited amount of light that can go through, so the stronger the source, the better. You can naturally make this on an overcast day but the effects will be weaker, you will have to make quite long exposures to see things clearly in a photograph and there will be less overall drama.
Next, you’ll need to choose a window with a view, preferably one that is opposite a wall we will project onto. To build a sample “device” I asked my friends Naomi and Louise at Cork Photo gallery to let me turn one of their rooms into camera obscura for a day. I had quite an easy choice in front of me as the room had a window with a view of a park and acoustical shell on one side and a gallery wall on the other. White wall works best, just like a screen in the cinema. But if you don’t have an available white wall as an option, you can use a white bed sheet instead.
Now you will have to black out the room. Getting a pitch black environment is always the goal, but as you can see in this short time-lapse, I still had few light leaks after taping all the windows and it didn’t really influence final effect all that much. The weather was quite capricious, but I left windows taped up for the following day hoping for a bit more sun. Thankfully, the weather took pity on me and the clouds opened up a bit.
After this experiment and the one we filmed for our recent episode of The Viewfinder, I was hungry for a bit more. This was why I thought about the ca(r)mera obscura. A big van into which we can drill a hole would be best, but my little hatchback worked as well. Once I was inside the blacked out car it was quite tricky to operate a camera on a tripod, especially when local police (Garda) came knocking on the window. Worried neighbors were obviously suspicious about a car with taped windows standing on the edge of the port’s waterfront, but I managed to squeeze in a few photographs anyway. First I tried the white sheet, but without something to stretch it on, it proved to be tricky. Fortunately, I usually have some photography related books around me, and I used them as my projection screen.
The first person to guess the smaller book’s author and title will get a small gift from me (please get in touch directly by contacting me on info@soundofphotography.com).
Here it is then – how to turn anything large enough into a camera obscura. We could naturally go the other way and make tiny pinhole camera but that’s a whole different article. Who knows, we might get to it at some stage in the future.
