Capturing Beyond
There are few times I’ve been this aware of how cold I am. Which is weird, since it’s only about 50 degrees out and the wind’s barely blowing. Spasms are starting to course down my arms from staying still for so long, and I shudder as I feel heat leech from my lungs with each breath. I start to wonder how many seconds it’s been before a sharp mechanical click cuts me off. If I’m completely honest, I don’t fully know what’s happening right now, but a few nights of trial and error over the last year suggest it’s probably just as important to stay still. I’ve started to feel time slowly, but after what I think is a minute, a small rectangular glow lights up the boulder in front of me, displaying a sky full of virtually indistinguishable squiggles. Carefully picking up the DSLR, I squint at the screen and zoom in until I see individual pixels. The wind must have slightly jostled the camera from the nook I settled it in, but, the exposure doesn’t seem to be a complete waste. Zooming out slightly, I pick up the washed-out lilac of the milky way over a blurry skyline of trees, and checking the image on my screen against the sky above, I’m pretty sure my exposure has picked up more stars than my eyes can. I bump the ISO up to 3200, dial the exposure time down to 20 seconds, check that the F-stop is at its bare minimum, and digitally zoom in on a star again to meticulously focus on infinity. Gingerly setting my camera back into its indentation, I roll an index finger across the trigger, taking another photo of stars I can’t see.
“So, what’s so interesting about these?”
It strikes me that I’ve been staring at this wall of silver gelatin waterfalls longer than me or any of my friends had at the Monet paintings in the gallery upstairs. I honestly have no response. How exactly does one compare a preserved view from life taken in a few moments against days, weeks, or perhaps months of meticulous work embodied in a painting? As an art neophyte, I feel utterly unequipped to take any strong opinions. I open and close my mouth a few times before fumbling out the last detail I had been observing.
“Texture?”
If you oversimplify my childhood, my affinity for photography becomes clear. I grew up in Rochester, New York, a city whose history had been the life and times of the Kodak company until the mid-1990s. Over the course of my childhood, I’ve been unconsciously doused in photographic history, from living near a disproportionate number of photographers to staring at dissected iterations of consumer cameras in George Eastman’s eccentric mansion-turned-museum. And perhaps as a consequence of this, I’ve learned to love photography not just for the images cameras capture, but for the litany of senses and interactions involved in the process that never appear in the final product.
A photograph is just a single, limited-resolution capture of a window of time in reality. While the result often looks similar to the world around us, it’s also different from the information our eyes continuously feed us. Professionals certainly push this difference in creating their works, but at least following my experience in a society saturated with point and shoots, phones, and instant cameras, we as a general public seem to have taken to the medium as an imperfect replica of our eyes. Photography becomes a tool, preserving visual memory for long term storage. And yet even for complete amateurs like myself, it can be so much more.
I’ve had this Canon point-and-shoot for a few years, but never fully understood what the small flower icon next to the navigation buttons meant until last week. Someone told me it’s called macro, and said it was useful for taking pictures of little things. Standing in the middle of a trail with forest on all sides and sea of multi colored mushrooms at my feet, I decide it’s good time to find out what this button actually does. I flip on macro and in an instant, the forest landscape on my screen becomes far less appealing. Taking a knee instead, I angle the lens beneath a cluster of bright orange mushrooms and take a picture of the gills. Without the context of reality, lighting, and a few leaves for scale, I might be able to trick myself into thinking it was any scale. For a few minutes, I play with the camera angle, capturing perspectives my body’s geometry would otherwise prohibit. I’ve been here for a few minutes, and my family is already far ahead. My name echoes through the trees with an annoyed tone, and I painfully pull myself away from the subject and bound off to catch up. The trail is different now, however, and where I still catch some interesting compositions as I dart between trees, I’m painfully aware of equally-compelling scenery racing beneath each footfall. It doesn’t take long after catching up to spot some moss in a sunbeam up ahead, and it feels like a cycle is beginning.
Needless to say, I have been insufferable on hikes ever since.
It’s taken about two months of squeezing 3D prints between classes, but I finally have 18 parts of Todd Schlemmer’s P6*6 pinhole camera design laid out on my kitchen table. It took a trip to a new local hackerspace for second opinions and an expendable sewing needle, but the pinhole I’ve punched from a piece of soda can looks like it should fit too. I nervously drive four screws into the plastic and run a few runny seams of hot glue down the sides of the main camera block, wincing a few times as my fingers brush against some hot transparent blobs in the narrow cavity. Just like childhood crafting I think to myself, though with much larger hands and the help of some more sophisticated tools. Clamping the warped lid over the camera, I duck into a closet with a roll of 120mm film and flail in the darkness until the reel is securely loaded. All that’s left is to find some worthy and mostly immobile subjects.
The rest of the afternoon is spent taking 60 second exposures of trees, random objects around the house, and my enormous childhood cat. The design has no viewfinder, a knob and window to the interior to advance the film, and a lever to physically expose or cover the pinhole, the process is jarringly analog. Without the immediate feedback of a screen or printed photo, each of the images is a shot in the dark, and I start to question if any will actually show up. With this comes simplicity however- without a zoom, focus, or angle to optimize, I have an opportunity to concentrate on the subject as I wait for the exposure to finish. It’s strange to be an observer alongside your camera, to be able to watch your subject alongside it or to walk away and pick it up later rather than using it as an instantaneous tool. I need to be more patient now, but it’s nice to finally meet my camera.
After 30 seconds of shivering under the stars, the shutter finally clicks again. Waiting for the long exposure to process, I feel cold dew off the grass starting to seep through the mesh of my shoes and dissipate through my socks. I’m really going to get cold now. The processed image that flashes onto the screen is far more clear than the others this night, with the added bonus of the red and cream streaks of a car’s tail lights across the bottom of the image. About as good as I’ll get in this field tonight without sinking much more time into practice or money into a better lens or a real tripod. But for now, I’m content with my jerry-rigged setup and the fact that this little engineered object in my hands can actually show me things my human eyes are incapable of seeing. There’s a pretty strong pull to take one more photo, and I’m starting to see why people on the sky photography forums I had consulted were speaking about getting addicted to getting more precise shots and seeing more. Ok. One more shot. I wonder what’s out there above those trees?
