When I was in college I spent a summer abroad at an art school in the south of France. It was a medieval village, and so instead of dorms everyone was scattered in various places throughout this village on a hillside.<p>Anyway, a couple of our classmates turned their entire room into a pinhole camera — a “camera obscura”, where the image of the whole valley was projected upside down on the wall.<p>It was pretty magical being inside of that.
You can buy solarcans that will produce a similar capture<p><a href="https://solarcan.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://solarcan.co.uk/</a>
There are a couple of people on reddit[1] who take some neat photos like that (but with 1-4 years of exposure time and not 8).<p>[1] This one for example: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/user/Solargraphy/submitted/?sort=top" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/user/Solargraphy/submitted/?sort=top</a>
Unfortunately there have been instances of solar cameras being reported as bombs. Police even “detonated” one with a robot a few years ago here in Atlanta. <a href="https://petapixel.com/2015/02/02/looks-like-someones-solargraphy-camera-just-got-blown-atlanta-bomb-squad/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2015/02/02/looks-like-someones-solargr...</a>
This is extremely cool.<p>It makes me think if you were an alien life form who lived for eons, maybe eight years would be like an eye-blink (in some sense), and perhaps this is one of the perspectives you would have, if you wanted it.<p>You know how successful artists often have a line or series that they return to and that really identifies them? I hope this is or can become that for her.
What qualifies as the longest exposure ever? Does it have to result in a photo of something distinguishable? Surely there's an old camera out there with a broken shutter that's been exposing some piece of film for decades, even though it's just an entirely exposed piece of film at this point
I once noticed how a newspaper would become yellow, except for square covered by a magazine. So I put newspaper with a large unprinted area in an old camera, left it exposed for a week and behold, it did show a vague skylines. Later I used red post-its, since red really bleaches in sun. Also worked, though not significant better.<p>A fun experiment.
It's a beautiful image having the quality of capturing an astronomic event over time. Could it perhaps be used to tell us something about the solar system?<p>I remember my astronomy and maths teacher, Franck W. Pettersen, rest his soul, teaching us how to build a telescope from scratch. We got a long cardboard tube, and some other pieces that we put together quite cheaply. The most expensive part was the lens, which we put at the end of the tube.<p>Earlier he worked as the director of the Northeren Lights Planetarium in Tromsø, but he quit the job, citing that it was much more rewarding to teach astronomy and physics to pupils rather than showing tourists around.<p>It is perhaps unseremonious, but the first use the telescope saw, was us boys trying to peek at the girls at the neighbouring high school, three kilometres away at Kongsbakken (King's Hill) accross the sound. It was a success. We could even read what the teachers there wrote on the blackboards with it.<p>Personally I've always liked night photography, and I've spent many hours making time lapse photography of the Aurora Borealis phenomena that is so common in the North of Norway. However I think this image is a testament to how also daylight photography of certain phenomena might also be very beautiful, and even moving.
Link with the photographer and the can...<p><a href="https://petapixel.com/2020/12/11/shot-with-a-beer-can-this-is-likely-the-longest-exposure-photo-ever-captured/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2020/12/11/shot-with-a-beer-can-this-i...</a>
TL;DR: Eight years of sun arcs were captured using long exposure solargraphy [1] at a teaching observatory near London. The pinhole camera was forgotten and left out longer than the typical 6-12 months.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-exposure_photography#Solargraphy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-exposure_photography#Sola...</a>
this has a picture of her beer can camera<p><a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/photography/2020/12/longest-known-exposure-taken-by-makeshift-camera-forgotten-inside-uk-telescope" rel="nofollow">https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/photography/2020/12/lon...</a>
There are several traces of light that don't seem to be made by the sun, a zigzag pattern running vertically on the right among other things. Wonder what those could be?
You don't risk "overexposing" (as the article says) anything with film/paper; basically you reach the "reciprocity failure" where the rule of exposure fails, and you can pretty much ignore the exposure time /completely/ at that point. Double it? fine. 4 times? still fine :-)<p>I've done many 30 minutes+ exposures on both pinhole and large format cameras. On the later, it captures an insane amount of tonalities from what you are imaging, almost like "HDR" but well, with just a piece of carboard for shutter and a watch to time how long your patience lasts :-)
This is similar to the "_______ DESTROYS ___________" in YouTube videos. It's one way of getting likes/upvotes/karma points.
It has to draw attention somehow. It has to have some weird thing (unexplained to the eyes of the author), a rare event (a Black Swan?) or something that is highly controversial so gets the discussion going.
It has been like that since the first headline on the first newspaper ever made by man (perhaps earlier, under other medium).