PJWphoto

So a thought occurred to me a few days ago…a camera obscura is usually built by placing a small aperture over a window and blocking out all other light. the result is an upside down and back to front view from the window,faintly projected onto the opposite wall.
On a bright day it can be very impressive once your eyes adjust, essentially the room is turned into a giant pinhole camera pointing out the window. so just like a pinhole camera you can cover the inside of it with photo paper and make paper negatives.

Buy hey, your window is made of glass for a reason, and your covering it over on a bright sunny day.

So to get back to the point of this post: I thought,why not use the front door instead…its usually closed and you cant normally see through it apart from the peep hole and the letter box….

while the peep hole might be interesting for other projects (like a cheap fish eye lens), it occurred to me that the letter box is the perfect pinhole mount, it even has a shutter of sorts!

I blacked out all doorways, the windows above doors, and taped around the front door. then wedged open the letter box and covered it with a hole cut in a piece of mat board

3 sheets of 12×16 Ilford photo paper ( pre-flashed using a filtered vivitar 283 flash) stuck to the wall opposite the front door were exposed for about 2hr 40min

I hope to scan these soon, but for now here’s a digital photo of the negs, inverted in photoshop and overlayed on a photo taken out of the letterbox.

I am pretty happy with the result, its nearly life size but a bit fuzzy and faint. With a slightly smaller aperture and an even longer exposure (all day?) it could look really good.

I recently got a fresh pack of paper and plan to continue this project, hopefully ending up with a wall sized mural, using many different exposures. I also thought that it could be interesting to try using colour paper in a few places on top of the black and white.

keep and eye out for progress