Thursday, February 26, 2009

Gameboy Camera Tutorial


Two chairs, taken with Japanese version of Gameboy camera.

I put a five page Gameboy camera tutorial on my website. Since then I have discovered the Japanese version of the camera. As you can see above, the images are four shades of brownish orange, not the green and blue of the American version below.


The sun creeping across the floor.


Same image in greyscale.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Solargraphy


My first solargraph scan.

Joanne Koltnow sent me a link to an site on solargraphy. It's such an amazing process. You expose a piece of photographic paper in a pinhole camera for a long time - weeks or months - depending on the size of your pinhole and your patience. Then you remove the paper in dim light and scan it. No chemicals! Repeated scanning degrades the image pretty quickly.

The images can be expressive and dreamy. Great potential for an artist's book. They are negatives, but can easily be inverted with photo editing software.


Second scan. I didn't make notes, but I think I hit the "auto" setting this time. Also made the selected area smaller to keep the scanner from running so long and shining excess light on the paper. The third scan was terrible - I increased the resolution so much that the scanner kept pausing, which made bands as the paper got bluer. My fourth scan was a much darker blue, and most of the details were gone.

All these images are from one piece of photo paper. I took them with my oatmeal pinhole camera, the pinhole was about .33 mm.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Neo-Vintage Photography workshop


Karen takes a digital photo.

The first Sunday of this month, Linda Stinchfield and I presented some techniques and gadgets -- ttv (through the viewfinder), Gameboy, Lensbaby, and zoneplate/digital pinhole -- to the Bay Area Book Artists. It was a fun day, and I think we piqued some interest.


Karen, Meggie and Diane working on a set-up.


Part of the enthusiastic BABA group.


Joanne is an accomplished photographer. On the left is a contraption I made from expanding gutter material.


People brought treasured toys and objects to photograph. They seemed to say a lot about their owners.


All these toys have both obvious and more subtle meanings.


Isn't he sweet?


An Ansco Panda. It has a medium sized viewfinder, isn't it nice looking?