When I was in eighth grade, we did a photography unit in my science class. This unit is probably responsible for me being so excited about photography today so thank you, science class!
Anyway, in that class, we each got to make (and decorate – mine was black with shiny star stickers all over it!) our own pinhole cameras so we could learn about photography while getting to play with our own pictures. Pinhole cameras are probably about the simplest possible cameras ever. All you need is a closed box (doesn’t even have to be a square… you can have a round tube) that doesn’t let any light in except through one point – the pinhole. Then you slap a piece of photopaper in the back of the camera and voila! Go take a picture. You take a picture by exposing the pinhole to light/your subject for some exposure time (practice makes perfect) and then sealing up the pinhole again. Now, all you need to do is develop the photo paper and tada! A photo magically appears before your eyes.
In my class, we had to take a certain number of pictures over the course of the unit and keep a journal documenting each picture: what the subject was, how long you exposed the subject, improvements you could have made, what you expect the picture to look like, etc. We also had to sign up to volunteer in the class darkroom during some lunch breaks to help develop everyone’s pictures. I loved it. I was in the darkroom almost every lunch time, developing people’s pictures and restocking their cameras with fresh photopaper for the next day’s photos. I was so excited about it (as was my sister when it was her time to do the photo unit), that my parents collected a bunch of their old photography stuff, bought developing chemicals, and made us our own darkroom in our house! Unfortunately, I actually didn’t do much photography in high school (or in college) but I did manage to take this picture (with my star-covered camera) probably senior year of high school.
Photoshop
This picture was super fun to edit with photoshop. Considering the fact that pinhole pictures come out as negatives (see below to see the original picture), my first task was to invert the colors on my picture. Then I just did some photo maintenance. After all, I developed this picture at least 8 years ago and then it lived on my wall in California (thank you to my mom for scanning it in) since then. So I took care of some damage spots and darkened both the dolphin (yes… that is a dolphin. I got it when I was 6… it’s been well loved…) and the lobster a little. I darkened the trees in the background and the spiny tree in the right hand corner too. I also cropped it a little to get rid of some of the extra deck in the bottom of the picture. Ummmmm… yeah! I think that is all.
The original image:
Hope you all are having a wonderful Wednesday…
Potassium Photography 