Daily Practice 247/365

Title: "When the sun chased the ghostly kite runner"

(click image to view larger)

  

Today I ventured out to a place where people often hang glide, wind surf and fly kites. I had my 4X5 pinhole camera with instant and regular film, and I wanted to use the wider open space to do some sun drawings. There was a fellow there taking a break from flying his kite who was interested in the camera; "must be ancient" was his comment. He started flying his kite, and I tried to follow it with the pinhole: there's a bit of a ghostly image of the kite in the top centre of the picture.

While adults were interested in the camera (one fellow with a digital camera was quite amazed to see me using film), a young girl of about 10 or 11 was interested in what I was doing. I answered that I was drawing with the sun on film, and she asked if she could try. Her mother came over to watch, and I gave her very minimal instructions - move the camera around, up as high as you can and as low as you can, and from side to side. As I watched her, I also saw her rotate the camera and tilt it towards and away from the sun. She was a little worried that it wouldn't turn out, but after we pulled the instant film and peeled it apart, she was absolutely thrilled. As was I - she hadn't moved her body much when using the camera, but all the tilting she did brought the drawing right across the entire frame. I told her that her drawing was the best I'd seen, better than the ones I'd done so far. Her mother immediately thought of getting the image enlarged and printed to frame for her daughter's room. It was such a lovely, fortuitous encounter and in many ways affirmed how doing even the simplest, most spontaneous art making brings something special into a day.

Daily Practice 240/365

Title: "Thought without a Thinker"

(click image to view larger)

  

I'm enjoying the basically uncontrollable nature of this type of image making, and the completely abstract nature of the resulting image. I've printed a few as 8X10s and they have a wonderful luminous glow (as do the smaller, original instant prints). I'm excited to see where this experimentation will lead.

Daily Practice 238/365

Title: "The path of the sun"

(click image to view larger)

 

Still playing around with these sun drawings. I like the very organic shapes the lines take on, at the moment it's difficult for me to predict what will result, and I'm happy enough with that.

Daily Practice 235/365

Title: "Thought without a thinker"

(click image to view larger)

  

I wanted to follow up on my experiment from a couple of days ago of using a pinhole camera to "draw" with the sun. I had a couple of exposures of Fuji 100c 4X5 instant film in the holder, so I decided to use that with my 4X5 pinhole camera. A little trial and error resulted in this image, which gives me some indications of how to take this idea further.

  

One of the things I hadn't anticipated was the much wider angle of view of my 4X5 pinhole camera vs. the home-hacked polaroid pinhole camera I used for this image. I had made fairly small movements with that camera and covered the smaller format instant film easily. My first couple of experiments with the 4X5 using a similar range of motion resulted in very small effects, as shown in the two images below:

  

(click image to view larger) 

  

 (click image to view larger)

  

I think there may be some possibilities with these smaller "drawings" as well, especially once I expand my horizons and get out of the back yard with this idea.

  

To get the top image, I was actually moving from one side of the yard to the other, and putting the camera high above my head, and down to my ankles. Since images are inverted on the film, I can tell that down to the ankles is so far that the sun "moves" off what is the top of the image. I can also tell that I'm not tall enough to extend the camera high enough to cover to the bottom of the image. And I need a larger back yard (or a nice stretch of beach) to get complete coverage from side to side.

Daily Practice 233/365

Title: "Sun drawing"

(click image to view larger)

  

Just having a bit of fun with a home-hacked pinhole camera and expired Fuji FP-100c. This was the last exposure from the pack, and it could hold the germ of an idea for a series of images.