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My digital camera thinks a long exposure is a few seconds. Sometimes I get out my tripod and fool around with night photography — it’s amazing what a 30-second exposure can read in the dark that your eyes can’t! But 30 seconds — even 30 minutes — is nothing. British photographer Justin Quinnell is making waves with an amazing six month exposure he made in Bristol, England of the sun rising and falling over the city’s famous suspension bridge:
He made the photo not with a fancy digital camera but with an extremely rude, homemade device — a pinhole camera made from an empty soda can with a .25mm hole punched in it and one sheet of photo paper inside. He strapped it to a telephone pole and left it there for six months, from December 19, 2007 to June 21, 2008. If those dates sound familiar (or astronomically significant), they are — they’re the winter and summer solstices, respectively.
The lowest arc in the photo is the sun’s trail on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. The highest arc is the summer solstice. The lines which are punctuated by dots represent overcast days when the sun penetrated the clouds only intermittently.
From the UK’s Telegraph, my favorite detail:
Mr Quinnell, a world-renowned pin-hole camera artist, of Falmouth, Cornwall, said the photograph took on a personal resonance after his father passed away on April 13 – halfway through the exposure. He says the picture allows him to pinpoint the exact location of the sun in the sky at the moment his father passed away.
A longer exposure is currently in the works, courtesy a San Francisco artist named Jonathan Keats: a 100-year exposure of a hotel room. (More about that here.)
Comments (14)
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Looks great, it goes to show that you don’t need thousands of dollars of gear to capture an amazing image!
posted by Alan Parekh on 1-13-2009 at 9:42 am
The fact that the shot was taken through a soda can is amazing. Well done to the guy just for coming up with the idea of the shot in the first place!
posted by Cannonball Jones on 1-13-2009 at 10:02 am
Great image and concept. I’d love to see how he calculated the exposure time.
As for the homemade device… my guess is the author really intended to say it was ‘crude’ rather than rude ;)
Cheers.
posted by Jim on 1-13-2009 at 11:13 am
Interesting that one of the track is fairly tight, while the other, on the right, if quite spread out. I wonder which end is west?
posted by Michael David on 1-13-2009 at 4:24 pm
The arcs look more as though they’re coming at you than necesarily going upward if you look at it the right way. This was a great post. Thanks!
recaptcha: obvious ly
Serious ly.
posted by nikki on 1-13-2009 at 6:30 pm
in the northern hemisphere, the sun is towards the south of the zenith. so, i think in the picture we are facing south, and thus west is to the right.
also, i’m thinking the photo must be distorted quite a bit to get such a wide shot – the negative lined on the inside of the curved can would in effect create a wide angle shot.
great idea!
posted by Dennis on 1-13-2009 at 7:54 pm
@ Michael David – Considering you have to be looking south to see the sun through the whole arc in the Northern Hemisphere the West is on the right side of the picture (…unless I’m completely wrong in which case I’ll be corrected shortly)
posted by rfl717 on 1-13-2009 at 10:17 pm
“Rude” is used correctly here; one of its definitions is “crude.”
Amazing photo.
posted by annejumps on 1-14-2009 at 2:08 pm
I don’t get how it wasn’t over exposed… someone please explain!!
posted by jacqueline on 2-13-2009 at 11:24 am
Bristol ftw! :D
posted by Hal on 2-21-2009 at 3:19 pm
It was just the other day I was talking to someone about the virtues of pin hole cameras. That photographer must have had the patience of a saint. beautiful!!!!!!!!!
posted by chris on 2-28-2009 at 5:07 pm
@ jacqueline
There are three things that normally affect the exposure of an image:
1. The aperture.
2. The shutter speed.
3. The film speed.
If you increase one, you will have to decrease one of the others or you will have an over-exposed photo.
In general, things are roughly halved or doubled each time they are decreased or increased. 1/60th of a second becomes 1/125th of a second or 1/30th of a second. ISO 100, ISO 200 and ISO 400 are the most common film speeds although digital cameras often have settings of ISO 800 and ISO 1600. As for the aperture, each stop is spaced so that the area that is open to let light into the lens is doubled as you go up.
In this case, we know the shutter speed was six months and the aperture was very small (a pinhole) but I suspect that just using a pinhole-sized aperture wouldn’t be enough to balance the extremely long exposure time.
He may have used a slower film but I have no idea how slow films can go and if that could ever be enough to add up to six months.
My guess is that he further reduced the amount of light reaching the film by placing a dark filter in front of the film that blocked some of the light. This would have taken a lot of trial-and-error, probably taking exposures of several days at a time and viewing the results until he figured out how much filtering he would need for a six month exposure.
posted by David Keech on 3-30-2009 at 9:18 am
This picture brings out the brilliance in photography. It’s beyond looking for something pleasing to the eye, and how creative one can get with a camera.
posted by James on 5-3-2009 at 7:17 pm
Cool, but I think you meant extremely crude…
posted by Aaron on 9-14-2009 at 12:23 am