January 18, 2006
Workshop negative experience
GT Heritage Center presents hands-on pinhole camera program
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
With a two-minute exposure, a cardboard body sealed with electrical tape and an aluminum foil lens, it was photography at its crudest.
But it worked and many of the 17 participants in the Pinhole Camera Workshop Saturday afternoon left with a negative image taken using a camera they crafted. Held at the Grand Traverse Heritage Center in conjunction with their S. E. Wait exhibit, students harked back to the beginning of the photographic age. The Traverse City Camera Club and Blue Photo helped sponsor the event.
Instructor Dan Truckey outlined the history of photography, which dates back to the daguerreotype cameras pioneered in France in the early 1800s. He also described the fundamental mechanics of camera operation and how a photograph is captured.
"Basically, what a photographic camera is a box with a hole in it," said Truckey, who is the executive director of the Heritage Center. "What we're creating is really just a very small camera. It's an imperfect process but we're all going to learn."
Members of the Traverse City Camera Club helped out at the event, loading the special photographic paper into each camera and later developing the images. They turned the men's room downstairs into an impromptu darkroom.
The night before the seminar, volunteers also helped Truckey spray paint the interior of each box black. This ensured that light entering through the pinhole lens would not bounce around and refract and ruin the image. Instead, it would go to the back of the camera where the photographic paper was positioned.
Truckey led participants step-by-step through the taping of all box seams plus the making and fixing of the lens. The opening on the lens was literally a pinhole in the aluminum foil, allowing just enough light in to react with the photo-quality paper.
When the cameras were completed, participants went outside in groups of three and positioned their cameras horizontally on a table in front of the Heritage Center. Since it was a breezy day, they weighted each box down so the wind would not move it and blur the image.
With Truckey manning the timer, they lifted a final piece of electrical tape from the lens and stood back to wait, just as photographers 100 years ago did.
"We're taking pictures of the white house across the street," said Lisa Erickson, referring to every photograph's target: Dee Blair's Sunnybank Garden home
Erickson attended the event with her daughter, Xena Morgan, 9, as a special mother-daughter time while her husband took their son to Boy Scouts.
"I thought this would be cool," she said.
The resulting four-inch by six-inch negative image was a far cry from the crisp digital and film images modern eyes expect. But it had the charm of being something participants made themselves, although not every image turned out.
"I want to take another one," said Noah McKenzie, 9, who attended the session with his father, Robert, and took home one of the successful images.
The S.E. Wait: Traverse City Photographer and Renaissance Man exhibit, featuring more than 30 large format photographs will be at the Grand Traverse Heritage Center, 322 Sixth St., through April 1. The center is open Tuesday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. For more information, contact the Center at 995-0313.