Wednesday, August 1, 2007

A ceramic camera


Any guesses what this is? It is actually a ceramic camera. One of Steve Irvine main interests besides pottery is pinhole camera photography. Since pinhole cameras can be made from just about anything, it's only natural that he would make one out of clay.
This camera is designed to use a 4 x 5 inch piece of photo paper as the negative. The lid on top is removed in a dark room, and the paper negative fits into a holder at the back of the camera. The interior of the camera is glazed matte black. The exterior has stoneware glazes, plus a post-firing application of 23 K gold leaf.
The small knob-like lid on the front of the camera is removed (as shown in the middle photograph) to allow light to pass through a .3 mm pinhole in the middle of the metal disk, which exposes the negative to the image being photographed. There is no lens involved. Exposures for pinhole cameras are often fairly long; anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. After the light has been collected in the camera, the photo paper negative is removed in a dark room and processed to reveal the image.

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