Man Ray

Out of the photographers I have looked at in this project Man Ray's pin whole work inspired me the least.






From what I can see he appears to be somewhat of a surrealist, I havn't managed to link any of his work to mine.





Man Ray's pin hole work seems to be quite typical, the sort of basic shot which is being produced in our lessons. What was inspiring about the others photographers was their effort to change the norms of pin hole prints adding some demension to their work.





Man Ray appears to have an outstanding reputation for his fashion and portrait photography. He seems to be much more of an artist than just a photographer. He has produced work with much more meaning which I imagine would be quite expiring in other projects.



From my research I have found that Man Ray seems to be one of the most experimental photographers of the era. His work now considered historical would have been a whole new concept during his era. Man Ray did indeed distort and manipulate standard techniqes and stepped away from typical forwards portrait shots.
However with more photographers taking up Pin Hole photography much more recetnely I think that without investigation I was lead to belive Man Ray's work could be disregarded as historical and frankly somewhat borning.

First Pictures

I've taken a few shots with the pinhole camera I have made. Its interesting to see the results but frustrating as a perfectionist. At least with digital the variables are identifiable and there is lots of information and inspiration for taking good shots for presentation.

But with a pinhole not only must timing be considered, its difficult to work out exactley what is in shot. There's also design flaws like size of the pinhole which are bound to effect the print, like the size of the whole... surely if the whole is bigger a wider beam of light will hit the paper will this effect focus, cause blur or an over exposed effect? If I had a smaller whole wouldn't that mean that I had a smaller, sharper image? But that would mean less light in a time period, does that mean I'd have to expose the media for longer?

There is so much to explore and frankly I don't think I have enough time to explore it all. Some of the prints I have now are ok, they can be identified and matched to the featured objects. Therefore I am not going to spend lots of time exploring the effect of the pin hole size, logically its self explanatory: The whole needs to be the size of a pin pierce.

The variable when taking shots with the pin hole seems to be the exposure time and the amount of light in the shot. For my presentation I will take several shots which have had different expose times... I'll present in a chronological order. And to make sure the presentation shows an fairly tested experiment I will take the shots at the same time of the day in the same place. Then I should be able to conclude with an idea how long exposure should be to create good prints. I also hope to be able to use the information to take some more good shots of other objects.

Pin Hole Cameras

The concept of a pin hole camera looks relatively simple.

I've done a little research (picture left is from wikipedia) and in addition to what Mr. Davies said the simplest designs are the best. Its just important that pin hole cameras don't allow any light in.

I will simply use a piece of black card to make two boxes bids of the same size. I'll then put a hole in once of the faces and mount paper to the inside of the opposite lid. So whats pictured is the same as what's shown in the picture above.

I predict that the difficultly will be in mastering the exposure time. I also suspect that we will have to expose the paper for a fair amount of time.. 10 secs or so... I assume to stop blurring the objects in shot must be still.

Project 2: Drawing with Light

My interpretation of my target for this assessment means I am to use my journal more, planning & evaluating in detail.

My journal is a neat, clean, bound book. I am going to blog as much of my journal work as possible since I think it will be more effective annotating and planning for work in digital format. But when I print it for my physical journal it's going to look undoubtedly neater than my scruffy writing.

The first thing we are going to be doing is making a pin hole camera. I am going to do is make a pin whole camera.