Nearly twelve months ago I happened to be talking to a
friend of mine about shooting some film and the discussion came round to idea
that I fancied having a go at building a pinhole camera; probably a large
format pinhole camera at that. The next
time we met, Bob, handed to me a Micropress 4” x 5” camera that had been broken
but would make a suitable toy for me to play with.
The reason I wanted to shoot a pinhole?
I’ve long admired really long exposure images for quite some
time and even played with them myself (with a digital camera). I also love the quality of a large format photograph. There is something very beautiful and tactile
about handling one of these large negatives.
Knowing that you can get a really sharp image from a pinhole camera then
this seemed an obvious choice. The
combination of a really small aperture and slow film would surely bring about
the images that I was looking for.
Of course not every subject suits long exposures. The flow of water and the movement of the sky
are subjects that really become something else when this type of photography is
used.
It didn’t take me long to hit on the idea of using
Lancashire’s coastline as the subject. I
want something quite stark, minimalist, and monochromatic but at the same time
recognisable.
I have also started to develop ideas of what I want the
final outcome of the essay to be.
I’ve been toying with the idea using alternative processes
to create prints for a while and it seems fitting that photographs of the
Lancashire Coastline should be printed using a constituent of sea water, salt.
This is early days.
These are ideas. Come back soon
and see how the essay is developing.
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