So, this weekend I made myself a dark room in my garage and made my own developer and fixer. The developer is made from a mixture of Basil, vitamin C tablets and Bicarbonate of soda. This does work, slowly. It needs around 20 min in the developer to reveal the image. The fixer is an acid solution of lemon juice and water. This is the part that I am having issues with. A few early attempts (thinking back to using chemical fix) didn’t work very well. Either the solution is too weak or the image needed to be submerged for much longer. I also put this down to using fresh lemons rather than a CIF concentrate. I did later find some of this and add it to my fixer solution however I may remake this as my last attempt didn’t work. This may be due to being in the solution too long or the fixer being too acidic. Without a PH kit it is difficult to decide, so may start again on that one.
My first image that I had exposed was the above shot from the door way to the garage. I was able to expose this image, take a photograph of it on my phone and then use photo shop to flip, invert and edit the image. This was then followed by fixer issues again, the longer I sat trying to get a better photograph of the image I could see the paper reacting to the sun, so the above image was a kind of result for the first go. Pretty happy with it.
From there, I had taken one image, exposing the paper to 20 seconds of light. A few hours later I re-exposed the paper to a further 20 seconds of light at a different position in my garden. I was hoping for a double exposure effect and this is the result. Again I had issues with my fix solution and spending too long trying to capture the image from the paper on my phone resulted in the bleaching of the image in the sun light.
From my double exposure I started to get a little more confident with the subject, I was still testing ideas and the process at this stage and still using a 20 second shutter speed. This image had been submerged in the fixer solution for around 4 hours and while it did show some signs of bleaching after a little while the image still largely remains on the paper. This image above, was again captured using my phone camera. I believe that a scanner would produce better results. If I can get my scanner from my classroom this would be very useful for this process.
The above image is of a playground that has been taped up and notice signs on each apparatus warning of infections and spreading of the corona virus, due to such the park has been closed. I will attempt to re-take this image, maybe get closer to an apparatus.
This to focus on this week:
- Aim to develop and refine the process of the pin hole camera.
- Continue to take digital images of my local area / town.
- Re-evaluate my position within the project, what have I achieved / how do I propose to answer the question using participatory research.
Side note, To do the participatory research I need to use facebook / social media. URGH. I think I need to overcome this fear of facebook to move this project on…
More pin hole photographs
Exploring other ideas:
This week, with time on my hands I cleared out the garage to make the dark room. From doing this I found my old university portfolios and sketchbooks (wow, what was a I thinking…. ) but also I am glad that I had a look through as it had sparked a new avenue of exploration in my development. I had seen a series of responses to the current corona virus situation and a video tour of Sam wins tons studio. I liked his pen work and this made me think back to some of my practice at uni that was very much focused on illustration that made comments about current situations.
While this idea has my attention and have enjoyed working through making my concern here is that it does not engage a participatory research method but uses ideas shared through social media, specifically that of the facebook group of the housing estate that I live.
Pixels and Serifs. 