Beer can pinhole camera | 1-YEAR LONG EXPOSURE

later in this video i'm going to show you how you can build those [Music] essays i built pinhole cameras out of beer cans and i hung them up around my house and let them take a long exposure for one year and today's the day where we're gonna take them down and see what happened oh but you should stay tuned because later in this video i'm gonna show you how you can build those beer can pinhole cameras yourself [Music] we got one camera here and another one a little further this way and one camera up there you have to remember that these are pinhole cameras but still cameras so the shutter is still open to close it i will take a bit of tape and some scissors with me on the way to the roof [Music] cleveland here we are first camera [Music] [Music] time for a short little break because you can probably anticipate what's going to happen next therefore safety precautions first please stay safe and please do not do this at home at least not in the same way that i am doing it [Music] now that we're back on safe ground it's finally time to open up our cameras and scan in the pictures and yes you heard right even though there is photosensitive paper in here you would usually use in a dark room there is no need for any chemical processes if you would put this piece of paper into a developer it would turn black immediately because of the long exposure time of one year and regarding fixing i have heard different opinions some people say that it is okay to fix this piece of paper while some other people say that it could destroy your image so best way to just handle it is open it up scan it one time and then store it away but one more thing to take into account this piece of paper is still sensitive to light so if you leave it out in an area where it will get hit by the light for a long time it will slowly fog and then turn all gray so to avoid this it's best to store it away in a rather light tight area after scanning and for that i will simply use one of those sleeves with two thicker cardboard pieces of paper in there so i can simply sandwich up the image in between put it in a binder and that's basically it because the scan is all we need so when scanning in the piece of paper this is what we're left with it's a rather abstract shape and all we know is that it's a long exposure and of course it's a negative so first i'm going to open it up in camera raw and turn the negative into a positive to do so we're going to go to the curves panel here and invert this curve by dragging this point all the way here and this point all the way here and now i think it's a bit more clear what we're looking at here to show you a bit better first i'm gonna brighten up the picture a bit but here is where it might get a bit confusing since we inverted the curve all of the menu settings are also inverted so to brighten up the image instead of going this way we have to go this way into the direction to make it darker but i'm just gonna slightly increase the shadows a bit so we will get a better idea of what's going on in here and now i think it's a good time to explain to you what you're looking at this is a long exposure of the sun so the lines we see in here are actually the sun trails the beer can camera took a picture of the area for one whole year so all of these stripes are basically the sun going up and going down within the course of one year the stripes you see at the bottom here are when the sun was relatively low so this is the winter time and the stripes that you see up here these are the days in summer and what you can also see is that some of the lines are rather dotted and there is space in between the lines and this means that during these times of the day the sun was not visible so for example there were clouds in front of the sun in this shot i might have pointed the camera a little bit more upwards so you can also see the whole curve but i think to be honest this turned out quite alright you can see the house in the background you can still see some context variables for example some trees and the roof where i put the camera on and i think there's something we can do out of this so basically what i'm doing here is seriously improvising there's a lot of color in the picture but we just have to bring it out so what i'm gonna do now is just improvise and play around with the white balance with the curves in all the three different color channels also play around with the saturation and the color tones in here but also with the camera calibration and the tones of the camera in here so let's see what we're gonna make out of this [Music] okay i think that looks all right my main goal was to bring out the house a bit more to see the structures in the house and also bring some more colors into the curves and now i'm just gonna save it as preset and see if i can apply it to the other pictures as well [Music] got curious and want to try it yourself good because now i'm going to show you what you need to build one of those cameras yourself we are going to need some scissors some tape some sanding paper a needle and some paper for the purpose of showing you how the camera is built this is normal paper but to make it work this has to be photo sensitive paper so everything i'm showing you right now has to either be done in the complete dark or in the dark room to make sure that this piece of paper is not exposed to any light before putting it into the camera and self evidently to build can cameras we will need some cans you can take whatever can you like but i would recommend to take the slightly bigger ones and you will need a pair of two cans to build one camera because one will serve as a body and the other one will serve as a lid but if you're in the same situation as me that you don't have any empty cans but all you have are cans that are still full well i think you know what you have to do now i feel like such a bad role model being on the roof drinking in front of the camera all in one video what i have done so far is only to take off the top of the can with a can opener and i have cleaned and dried the cans properly and now we're gonna take one of the cans to choose as the body for our camera and the other ones we can put on the side for now so what we basically have to do to make a pinhole camera out of this is poke a hole into the can but to make the hole as small as possible we have to thin out the material of the can first so what we are going to do now is to take a piece of sandpaper sand the area down and then make a hole to just make sure that it's small and the material around us thin i'm going to start off with some a bit rougher sanding paper and just choose a spot where i think the pinhole would be good once we have taken quite a lot down already we can also choose a less grainy sandpaper and repeat the process just take your time when sanding this down because we have to be at a place where a lot of the material around here is gone but it's not that thin that the can is gonna rip apart and when we're at this point we're good to make our pinhole so i'm just gonna take a needle here you can basically measure it out but it's also okay to eyeball it i will just try to poke a tiny tiny little hole right in the middle of the can and you don't have to put the needle all the way in but just the tip of the needle is enough to make a good pinhole that can kind of handle a long exposure of a whole year so here we are we have our pinhole right here and now we can take our piece of paper and put it inside the camera so as you can see here we're trying to put the paper in the way that the pinhole is not covered and to make it stay in this place you will just secure it with a tiny piece of tape so like this take a tiny piece of tape and just secure the paper in place at this point we are almost done with our pinhole camera the only thing we still have to do is close this side of the can and the easiest way to do so is take another can cut it in half and put it on there as a lid so that's what we're gonna do now and just to secure light sneaking in we will probably tape everything up here what i also like to do to secure the care for moving and also from the weather is for example heavy rain because it can easily collect in here is to build a small kind of cover on here and i'm just going to do this by using some tape [Music] i mean this doesn't look too pretty but it does its job because now the rain cannot collect in here and this is very important to keep the camera steady for the duration of the long exposure the only thing we still have to do is build a shutter put something to cover up the sole so i'll just put a piece of tape over here and now the beer can camera is ready to see some light in austin so a good way to find a spot to put this camera up is to have a compass on the side because it's best if this camera is pointing towards the south since the sun is rising in the east and going down in the west by pointing it to the south we should have all the way from the sun going up and the sun going down all in one shot because of the field of view since this is kind of a round circle is almost not entirely but almost 180 degree so when pointing the camera into the direction of the south we should have the east and the west all in one shot so the beginning and the end of the way of the sun and that's basically all you have to know when building one of those cameras and hanging them up and before i forget one more thing you are going to need for this is time this is not a short term project but this is something that works best if you calculate some time in as you saw in my video my exposures were done over the course of one year but you can also choose a shorter time as for example half a year three months or only a month but then you have to keep in mind that the density and the amount of the sun trails will of course be way less and that is something you should also consider when hanging up your camera to choose a spot where it's safe and okay to let it hang there for quite a long time private property of course it's best but i have seen people who had solutions where they put a note on there to explain what it is and just make sure that nobody thinks that it's an object of danger yep that's it for today thanks so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video if you tried this yourself or if you want to try this yourself i would be very interested to see your results so just hit me up in probably a year and tell me how your experiment went with the pinhole beer can camera long exposure that said i would say see you next time

Channel: Karin Majoka

Views: 24,176

Rating: 4.9853749 out of 5

Keywords: analog photography, analog photographer, female photographer, solargraph, solargraphy, solar can, pinhole, pinhole photography, diy camera, building a camera, camera build, long exposure, one year long exposure, 1 year long exposure, karin major, solargraphy pinhole, beer can camera, camera out of beer can, experimental photography, experimental photography festival, creative photography

Id: KBRkbE5rkrU

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020