My initial MA project is something I've been trying to refine for a while now. I had loads of seeds of projects and ideas, mostly just areas of interest that I've been wanting to look into and explore. This list included everything from astrophotography, to a continuation of my super 8 stuff from last year, it even included a utilisation of processes such as collage and mixed-media. After some discussion with tutors, I decided it was a good idea to just try and dip my toes into as many of these ideas as I could to start with and see what stuck.
As mentioned in my "It's good to be back." post from October 2020, my first point of call was pinhole photography. Since then I have gone about creating a pinhole lens for my Olympus OM-1, as well as constructing my own panoramic 35mm pinhole camera from scratch. For the OM-1 lens, I took a spare body cap I had for the camera and drilled a hole in the center of the body cap. After doing that, I took a small square of aluminium cut out from a drinks can and painted the silver side with two thin coats of black acrylic paint. I then took a small sewing pin and carefully poked a hole through the aluminium, with the painted side facing up. The painted side facing up was important because I then had to gently file with a fine grit sandpaper the hole on the side of the aluminium the pin exited. If I had to sand the painted side it would only remove the paint. I thought it was important to paint the material first before creating the pin hole as I was worried wet paint would get trapped inside the hole thus making it smaller than intended and of an irregular shape. Once this was all done, it was as simple as taping the aluminium to the inside of the body cap so that the pinhole is in the center of the body cap. The painted side of the aluminium facing into the camera when the cap is attached, this to reduce the amount of reflected light within the camera thus reducing the chances of any light leak type marks on the images.
The constructed camera however, has given me a lot more trouble. I had found a DIY tutorial detailing how to create one, but the tutorial is lacking. It feels as if someone wrote a quick draft of a tutorial and published it without completing and refining it. I thought I could perhaps use this tutorial as a skeleton and reference guide for me to build upon and create my own, but its been a lot more difficult to do that in practice. I've ended up with more cardboard glued to my fingers than I have had cardboard glued to cardboard. In the tutorial it suggests a thin piece of card for the film plane, one that is curved so that the distortion of the pinhole image you see on a image created with a flat film plane is compensated for and instead a panoramic style image is produced. After a mid-work snack and a couple attempts I realised that the curve needed was exactly the same curvature as a Pringles tube (3 guesses what my mid-work snack was). From there I thought it might be easier to incorporate a small section of this tube into the construction of the camera. As of right now it still stands in a pile of cardboard and aluminium on my desk, taunting me every time I walk past it. I still aim to construct it and have it working, I know that its possible because the tutorial included finished shots of the camera and example images it shot, it just didn't really included any well written and full steps on how to get there. For now this will be put on the back burner as I have a pin hole that I can capture images on now, but that doesn't by any means mean I won't complete it, you might just have to wait for a later blog post to see it in its full and hopefully working glory.
I took the OM-1 body cap lens out for a test run the other day, just along the Ceredigion Coastal Path over the top of Constitution Hill on the seafront of Aber. This is my favourite local walk, one I've done many times before. I would like to take my camera on walks I haven't been on before, both locally and, Covid permitting amongst other factors, further afield. I've got a couple local points of interest on my radar, a couple natural springs, a reservoir, the other direction on the coastal path however, I want to have this first roll of images developed so I can fully troubleshoot the lens before taking it on a longer walk only to be disappointed once I get back into the darkroom.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am also interested in astrophotography. When I swapped degree schemes from astrophysics to fine art, my passion for the stars and space didn't just dissolve over night and it is something I've always wanted to fully incorporate into my work in some form. I've done the odd piece here and there throughout my BA that touched on themes related to my previous studies, but never within a project context. There is an official dark skies area just outside of Aber in Cwmystwyth that would be a perfect location to delve into this area of photography However, due to me not being able to drive and the busses being less reliable than usual this is a trip that would require a good amount of planning. As I would have to go over night due to no public transport operating in the early hours of the morning, camping seems to be the way to go. I would absolutely love to camp in Cwmystwyth but due to the pandemic their local campsite is closed until next year, and all the surrounding land seems to belong to farmers so I would have to look into whether it would even be a possibility to take some long exposures over night there. I never got the chance to camp for last years project due to adverse weather conditions and then the onset of the pandemic, so if I were able to do so for this project I would be over the moon (as would some of the images I would be taking on the trip).
My next point of call will be to work on really refining and honing in on the concept for this project. The why's and what's of it all. Due to the restrictions on where I can go and what I can do it has taken a little longer to finalise it all compared to what I would have liked, so putting my head down and having a couple long and deep thinks about the meanings of this body of work is something I need to do, and once that's all figured out I believe this project will pick up a lot more speed than it has so far.
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