San Francisco, from the Coastal Trail in the Marin Headlands

elaine: 10th May 2005 - 14:55 GMT

i have been to san francisco, but i didn't make it cross that bridge. i did go the science museum, where they made the whole building into a camera by having a door ajar, that was cool. i used to be able to do that in a room in edinburgh i had - you need heavy curtains and a certain relationship with the sunlight

Lili: 12th Jun 2005 - 13:56 GMT

Da Vinci apparently made 'pinhole' projectors for some of his work by using a darkened room. Did they use film - pretty big sheet ?

elaine: 12th Jun 2005 - 19:22 GMT

you can make a pinhole camera with any room - camera means room, as it happens. What you need, though, is there to be only one source of light. if you want to try it i would start small, with boxes and cans, then straight to the darkroom. you could do bigger, but it would be expensive, so you'd want to get a feel for it first. i never heard of da vinci using pinhole, though he may have, but vermeer is definately thought to have used it, but i do not know if they had any way of preserving the results, i mean, you could use the projections to draw straight from, so it's not the only way to capture an image. the exploratorium image was good, though i can't remember what it was, just that it was recognisably what was outside, but probably distorted. in my bedroom in edinburgh you could just get the reflection of the colours of buses and cars going past, nothing really good. recently i heard of an artist, and now i am pissed off i don't remember her name, who made photographs by taking photographic paper outside on a full moon and floating the paper under the surface of a river and branches of trees to get an image... using the universe as a pinhole camera has to be the biggest example ever.
if you do any i'd love to see them - good luck

Lili: 12th Jun 2005 - 20:20 GMT

Elaine, thanks.

check this link:

http://users.rcn.com/stewoody/quote.htm

When I was a "munchkin" Dad showed me how to build the pinhole cam.
I'd love to know the name of the artist, if and when you recall. I
often wonder about discoveries made in 'pre-history times' re tech that
we see as recent. Example; was photosensitivity of materials recognized
utilized for some sort of "photographic" purpose in 'pre-history'
times or well before it is now thought to have been discovered ?
Certainly this is true for medicinals and in many other areas.

Just discovered this site about a year ago - friend directed me to it -
excellent - very good. Thanks.

Lili

elaine: 12th Jun 2005 - 20:37 GMT

i can't remember the name of it offhand but there was a kind of photographic techmique which was used i think in victorian times which was beautiful - blue and white. it was a kind of photosensitive emulsion which they would paint onto fabric and then they would put complicated shaped leaves on top and then leave them in the sunlight, the negative of which would go inky blue. i may be aboe to dig it up, but it was a kind of photography rather than printmaking because of the photosensitivity

Lili: 12th Jun 2005 - 21:17 GMT

Elaine,

A quick-shallow search using "photographic technique contact fabric"
didn't yield. But the technique rings a faint bell for me - am trying
to recall - my recall is often slow but accurate.

Lili

elaine: 13th Jun 2005 - 07:41 GMT

i remembered - they are called cyanotypes, and if you search that you get recipes and everything. some examples athttp://www.astro.wisc.edu/~mukluk/blprint.htmlto give you a visual hook

elaine: 13th Jun 2005 - 07:43 GMT

sorry, idiot! here - www.astro.wisc.edu/~mukluk/blprint.html

Lili: 13th Jun 2005 - 08:18 GMT

Oh, yes, I ran across this earlier. So fabric was used instead of paper ?
The effect with fabric must be nice - grainy ?

Lili

elaine: 13th Jun 2005 - 10:22 GMT

i remembered it as a fabric thing, but maybe i was wrong, or else maybe, since you can make the emulsion yourself you can put it on anything. i was quite intrigued about it at one point and was going to try and use it for teaching, but it seems that the ingredients for the emulsion are really toxic so it would be a health and safety nightmare in a group, but if you are working on your own then you've only yourself to look after... i had read about it and seen it in magazines, but never live. i liked the subtlety of what i saw, more like photographs than printmaking, but much dreamier than regular photos. i used a monochrome photographic emulsion once, tried it on fabric, paper, ceramic tile, that was very subtle too