Ditch the DSLR? The 200-year-old science of my new favorite camera (2^14 sub special!)

digital cameras are getting smaller and smaller you're watching me right now on this sony mirrorless that's you know probably about the size of my hand which is pretty respectable but then there's also this gopro that i film with it's this tiny little cube and then my phone camera which is basically a little speck hiding behind this aperture at the other end of the spectrum we have this which i just built and this is an exceedingly large camera i figured that if my first foray into analog photography was worth doing it was worth overdoing so you feed this camera entire sheets of sensitized paper and 11 by 15 posters exit the camera ready to hang on the wall there are a few quirks about this camera that i'm going to get into in a few minutes notably a painfully painfully low effective iso a significant spherical aberration and focusing problems and also a wee bit of a tendency to light itself on fire but all of that aside i have had great fun with this project and i expect to take a great many more pictures using this camera [Music] the first step in making a camera is creating a light sensitive element modern cameras use electronic pixels that create an electronic signal proportional to the amount of light shining on them but old cameras analog cameras use light sensitive chemical reactions the process i'm going to be showing you today isn't actually really a photographic technique but a print making technique it was never really intended to be used in a camera like this just to make photographic prints from film negatives it's called the cyanotype or blueprint process and it was originally created by sir john herschel in 1842 as a method for reproducing drawings like oh yeah i want to make this book about astronomy but i need a way to you know recreate pictures rapidly why don't i invent an entirely new photographic chemistry just so that i can do that scientists back then were a different breed his recipe was basically untouched until very recently all of the old like blueprints architectural drawings that you've seen used herschel's original recipe today i'm going to be using a slightly modernized version that exposes a little faster from mike ware today we are making a cyanotype camera first step in making that is mixing cyanotype solution which contains cyanide counter-intuitively the cyanide isn't actually the toxic part because despite grinding the potassium ferric cyanide into a fine inhalable powder the cyanide ion is trapped inside the fairy cyanide ion and then bonded to a metal it's not the hydrogen cyanide that you know spies keep in their teeth or the doctor gave to dr air away before the voyage in contact no the the most worrying thing about this is that there's like sort of a yellow stain which i believe is the ammonium dichromate leaking out which is just lovely that and the fact that they use degrees fahrenheit in the recipe just fill me with confidence the most toxic thing in this recipe is actually the ammonium iron iii oxalate which starts as these lovely blue green crystals that somehow remind me of something when you mix these three chemicals together overheat and then let the solution cool potassium iron iii oxalate precipitates out this would yield about 33 milliliters of fluid and the rest would be discussed in green sludge and you can filter it away as these slightly less lime green and more forest green crystals wow that's really cool that's beautiful there's your green sludge it's crystallized out of course me the material scientist is always excited about crystals but once you get rid of them you're left with a bottle of sort of a yellow colored liquid that when exposed to ultraviolet light turns into a vibrant blue referring to this as a dark room is pretty generous it doesn't really block out very much light but on the other hand the cyanotype process isn't really all that photosensitive so it might work anyway so i've been keeping the sensitizer in here is that on camera yeah inside of a completely closed box that i even put a lid over to stop straight light coming in so i'm hoping that this is not yet you know used up yep still a yellow green color of course you you can't see that on that camera but i swear it's a sort of clearish yellow green then this is just citric acid this is now clean so i'm going to get probably a pretty good syringe full of this syringe but i don't know pipette cool now we need a little bit of citric acid so mix this up i'm not sure this is going to come across on camera at all because it's white because it's like a greenish liquid on white but here i'm using a glass stirring rod to spread the solution so that i don't waste any especially since i only ever coat one piece of paper at a time if i was using a brush a lot of sensitizer would just get stuck in the brush and would be wasted so the glass is an interesting workaround oh that's so infinitely better than when i tried this a week ago a little bit of practice goes a long way if you want to make a blueprint-esque image using cyanotype paper you first need to create a mask here i have a transparency sheet and i'm writing on it in black sharpie because ultraviolet light is going to go through the transparency sheet but ultraviolet light is not going to go through the sharpie this one gets this clipped to it and there we go okay so the first time i tried this about a week ago as a test it was mind-bogglingly fast the thing exposed in less than a minute it's a lot brighter today so i think it might be even faster there we go that's like instantaneous wow the yellow sensitizer solution is being transformed by the ultraviolet light into a pigment chemical called prussian blue because i'm a material science nerd i have to point out that prussian blue is a really cool structure that was just a couple seconds iron fairy cyanide where the fairy cyanide ion made of iron and cyanide looks like this big 3d cross and it's stuck together at its ends by more iron into this cubic crystal lattice the crazy thing is that this structure has iron in it with two different oxidation states and i think it's actually electrons jumping back and forth between these two different irons that allows the dye to absorb red orange light at 680 nanometers which has the result of making it look very blue so check this out me take the transparency off and the text is unexposed you can see that part of the pigment reacted to the light and part of it didn't it's got the dirty bath on the left dirty bath at least do it in two steps i figure critically this crystallized prussian blue is not water soluble but the original yellow sensitizer solution is that means that we can wash the exposed paper in water to get rid of the excess sensitizer but the exposed regions remain blue so we're left with a negative blue white image of our mask that worked really well oh yeah clip it up to dry if you want more precision say you wanted to make a design like a youtube play button that says 2 to the 14 subscribers you can actually print out an image on a transparency expose through that printed mask and then wash it to get really great crisp lines of course in this case an inkjet printer on plastic causes a lot of smudging so you know maybe less than perfect lines at this point you may be yelling at your screen he's making prints this isn't a camera the thumbnail had a camera in it the only difference between making prints and actually exposing a photograph is how you decide which areas of the paper get more light and less light so far i've been using a physical mask that blocks light from reaching certain parts of the paper and lets the light through in other places to turn the paper blue but what if instead i used a lens a lens basically takes all the light coming in from one direction and focuses it to a single point then all the light from a different direction comes and it's focused at another point and so on so if you focus a lens against a flat surface you can actually make an image where every spot in that image is made from light that approaches the lens from a slightly different direction and guess what now we have some parts of a piece of paper that are receiving more light than other parts of a piece of paper we can make a print out of this so i embarked on constructing a very large camera man settlements you could use a brand new saw and a piece of mdf that cuts like butter for a camera you need first a way to hold the sensitized paper or film a lens to create an image on that film and then a shroud to stop extra light from reaching the photosensitive paper all of the light in the camera should have to pass through the lens and contribute to image formation i designed the setup in cad printed out some parts and attached everything to a slide arm that fits on my largest tripod the paper is clipped to some mdf in the back that i've painted black to minimize reflections and the lens chucks into a 3d printed jig in the front there's an additional story here i don't have time to tell completely where my really cheap 500 millimeter lens was actually more like a 550 millimeter lens and then i forgot that focusing on close things made the distance even longer so basically i built everything too short and i needed to make some modifications but in the end it worked the shroud was by far the most tedious part to construct and it's basically just a whole lot of black poster board that's cut creased and hot glued together so that it completely envelops the lens and paper holder assembly letting no light pass in there's a 3d printed sort of sleeve in the front that actually allows the hood to slide down over the lens holder quite securely it's kind of weird because you have to look away from the thing you're photographing to line it up and the image is all upside down and backwards because of the way that the lens focuses it but the bigger issue is spherical aberration spherical aberration is a real pain the tree is in focus and the house is no longer in focus and then i tilt back and the house is in focus and the tree isn't like it's it's this much of the image now most film is tiny so you put your film here and it would be in super sharp focus and you'd have no problems but i wanted to make big prints i wanted to put a whole sheet of paper in here at once i could improve the focus dramatically by cranking down the aperture using a smaller diameter lens or just covering up parts of this lens but unfortunately that will also make it take much longer to expose and as it turns out exposure timing is is already a problem in order to originally calibrate the exposure time on this camera i set a piece of paper down in direct sunlight which i knew would expose in you know 30 to 60 seconds and i pointed a camera at that and i used the camera as basically a light meter to tell me how bright that piece of paper was for point of comparison i did the same thing inside the camera i put the same piece of white paper in the camera and i pointed the camera at the sky and then i took a picture of the paper in the camera through the viewfinder in order to figure out how bright that paper looked when it was illuminated by the sky and unfortunately it was really really dim so it turns out that i have made a grave mistake one exposure on this camera would take over 16 hours with the brightest thing in the picture being the sky i did the math earlier that is an effective iso of 0.00046 so as opposed to like an iso of 100 or an iso of 1600 no we go down by like seven orders of magnitude the first picture that i took only exposed for about two hours and the palm tree that i was photographing was moving back and forth in the wind a lot so while it was a good test and upon washing i got an image that image was both very faint and very blurry the next shot that i took was a picture of our roof sun is about to set the sky is not as bright as it normally is at least not during the middle of the day so i'm going to pull the camera there is some manner of image there here were a bunch of vents and skylight heads and stuff like that and i was hoping to see how much detail i can capture at least near the middle the image in the viewfinder looked extremely sharp this is my print of the roof of the house there's a lot of detail here um which is very nice but i was really hoping for for more crispness than that because i know that the actual image projected onto the paper was sharper than that so i'm trying to figure out what the issue is i'm pretty sure that when i pulled this paper off of the well i guess it would have been upside down i think that due to humidity or you know heat or whatever it was actually buckled out in the middle like that a little bit so basically the center was too close to the lens and i think it just straight up came out of focus so i want to be able to press the whole sheet flat while i'm exposing and to do that i have a sheet of acrylic but i need to make sure that acrylic is going to be transparent to ultraviolet light it really doesn't matter how quickly this exposes i just want to see how it exposes differently the part that's under the acrylic versus the part that's not under the acrylic so i'm not even going to bother to time this i just want to see it turn blue it's not looking good oh nuts knowing that the cyanotype chemistry is sensitive to ultraviolet not visible i decided to run a test and i'm really glad that i did well you know once it dries that'll be about fully exposed and this is somewhere down there so i lose about half of my ultraviolet when i go through that piece of acrylic instead i just decided to tape all the way around the perimeter of the paper it kind of hurts because i really enjoyed having the binder clips on it because they leave a mark and i really love when you can look at something and immediately know how that thing was made and with tape it's a little less obvious of course with a day or two of exposure time per image my options for taking photographs around town with this camera are limited so the third picture that i took was drum roll please the front of the house there were two added complexities with this one first i was worried about the camera being disturbed by pedestrian which meant that all day i was sort of leaning out the window to check on the camera but second the camera was pointed generally south which meant that direct sunlight could at certain times of the day hit this lens this is bad news because if the sun were to actually get focused to a point by that lens the paper the actual photographic paper or the black poster board that the camera was made of would get hot and run the risk of starting a fire i actually ended up pulling the camera late in the day because i was paranoid that the sun was shining into the camera oh that's getting brighter okay yeah i need to be done darn it but that turned out to be a bad call for the quality of the image there's a lot of blue coming out man you can't see much of the house i'm disappointed it needed a longer exposure that's amazing it needs like two days basically got the driveway in the sky the last picture that i took before making this video was on an unfortunately windy day but i basically just abandoned the camera in a parking garage on campus over the weekend pointed northeast into the mountains i arrived just after sunrise to set up the camera and came back to retrieve it late that night despite the trees blurring out in the wind i really love this shot because you can make out the sky the mountains the trees and the foreground all independently it felt like a very real photograph despite being kind of blurry now it's hanging by our front door opposite the pale blue dot and the roof texture shot is in the living room next to bender and 3po unlike most of my projects where i'm sort of completely finished with it before publishing a video this time i know that i'm going to keep using this camera because it's a pile of fun i really like the images that i'm getting out of it and the technical challenge of trying to improve the process is just wonderful so if anybody has any suggestions about things that i should take pictures of or things that i could do to make the camera even better i would be all ears so leave comments below thanks for watching [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: AlphaPhoenix

Views: 79,405

Rating: 4.9442797 out of 5

Keywords: Alpha, Phoenix, Alpha phoenix, Alphaphoenix, Materials science, crystallography, physics, chemistry, science, investigation, Photography, analog photography, cyanotype, Herschel, blueprint, Lens, spherical, aberration, exposure, ISO, cyanide, Diy, camera, 3d printing, Education, teaching, grad school, university, high school

Id: ewQQX3fxQKk

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021