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Pinhole portrait, Mathare North |
Having introduced children at Mathare North, Sipili, and GOAL to some of the principles of photographic image making with our Sunprint Project, we took the next step with a Mathare North workshop on making and using pinhole cameras. You can see some of the results on the World Pinhole Photography Day website, where pinhole pictures taken all over the world on the day of April 26 are posted. This Day has been held every April since 2001 and these are the first images from Kenya to ever be posted there! (Go to the 2009 gallery and search for Kenya.) Pinhole cameras are very simple lensless cameras that operate on the same optical principals as the “camera oscura” from which all cameras take their name. “Camera oscura” means dark room...and a camera oscura is a room which is kept completely dark except for a small opening that admits light. In such a room, you will see an image of whatever is outside the small opening projected on the opposite wall -- upside and down and reversed! |
KLT Trustee Susan Phillips and volunteer Margaret Kasten brought all the necessary materials for the children to make and use their own pinhole cameras. Susan and Margaret then spent some time encouraging the participants to think about light, how it travels, and how it can be captured in a photograph, with the goal of helping them understand how their cameras would work.
Our pinhole cameras were made with Pringles potato-chip tins (small size), thick black plastic, aluminum from a soda can, glue, and a little “drill” made from glueing a thin needle between the grips of a wooden clothespin.
The tins were the body of the camera. Each of the participants cut a 1-cm square hole in their Pringles tin (which are cardboard, not metal). Then, they each drilled a very small round hole in a piece of aluminum. The aluminum was glued to the Pringles can so the round hole could serve as a way to get light into the “camera”. The lids of the Pringles cans were covered with black plastic, and the kids used another piece of black plastic to form a “shutter” that could cover the hole then be lifted to make an exposure.
If you'd like to learn more, or make your own, there is a lot of information online about pinhole cameras and photography.
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Pinhole photograph, Mathare North |
Once the cameras were made, we tried to make the study room at Mathare North library as dark as we could, and then the children loaded their cameras with pieces of black-and-white photographic paper. We went outside and the children took pictures of each other in the street. |
However, Susan reloaded the cameras in her own darkroom and returned them to Mathare North, where staff oversaw a “reshoot”. The results won’t win any photographic awards -- but are still just a little bit magic.
Because pinhole cameras require long exposure times -- 15 to 30 seconds is common -- the images often include interesting effects caused by the camera or the subject moving during exposure. Our Mathare North pictures are peopled by some odd ghosts...one of whom seems to be talking on a cellphone!
Taking the lessons we learned from this workshop, we hope to have more libraries participate next year, and to have better results with some improved pinhole cameras.
