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zepps_apprentice

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Went on a cruise today. Had a 5 minute stop over at the scenic Rangitoto Island (famous for its volcanic terrain). The above shots are some of the highlights of what I came across in Rangitoto. Believe me, 5 minutes is sure not enough to explore that island! Sheesh! Oh well!

No fancy equipment used here folks. It was just me, my dear little cell phone and of course mother nature ;)

Hi 'Kiwi'

great shots just goes to show how good the cameras on cell phones are getting, looks really lovley.

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^Thank you Fool! :D The only complaint I have, is that I wish I had an entire day to explore Rangitoto rather than a mere crummy 5 minutes! :wacko: And at this rate, I don't think I need anything but my cell phone. I have had it for 3 years now and it practically goes everywhere with me! ;)

Edited by Kiwi_Zep_Fan87
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^Thank you Fool! :D The only complaint I have, is that I wish I had an entire day to explore Rangitoto rather than a mere crummy 5 minutes! :wacko: And at this rate, I don't think I need anything but my cell phone. I have had it for 3 years now and it practically goes everywhere with me! ;)

Landscape pics do I'd say have the largest sliding scale for equipment of any kind of photography. If you take shots in good lighting condictions and only want to view them on a PC or smaller prints pretty much any camera can give good results. On the flipside though the more challenging the pics you want to take and the larger you want to print the sky is the limate when it comes to camera, lens and filter costs.

Edited by greenman
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Year-long exposure of Toronto skyline produces 'dreamy' image

Published On Sun Jan 01 2012

705b87dd4321b6babfd4bb4febeb.jpeg

Photographer Michael Chrisman used a pinhole camera fitted with photosensitive paper

to make a 365-day exposure of the Toronto skyline from Jan. 1, 2011, to Dec. 31, 2011.

Michael Chrisman photo

Jim Rankin Staff Reporter

A year ago, Michael Chrisman placed a pinhole camera in Toronto’s Port Lands and aimed it — as best one can aim such a camera — at the city skyline.

For 365 straight days and nights, light has crept through the pinhole, slowly building an exposure on a piece of photosensitive paper.

Ponder that.

A typical exposure with a digital SLR on a bright sunny day, depending on aperture and ISO, might last between 1/250th and 1/100th of a second.

In Chrisman’s pinhole experiment, the “shutter” — there really isn’t one on a pinhole camera, just a piece of electrical tape or a removable cap, perhaps — has been open for 31,536,000 seconds, give or take a few.

On New Year’s Eve day, Chrisman trudged out to retrieve the camera and exposed paper inside.

“I’m thrilled with it,” Chrisman said Sunday. “It’s a very dreamy photo. This one has a soft and kind of foggy feel.”

Think of it as a time-lapse painting. The physical progress of the sun leaves a streak that shifts minutely each day. The daily on and off of building lights leaves only light, not dark. Once exposed, there is no way to undo it.

The camera, a simple black box, was mounted to the side of a rusty metal box next to a shipping beacon near the shipping canal. Chrisman used tape and a few bricks to “secure and position the camera for its long wait,” he said in an email exchange with the Star.

Chrisman, a 31-year-old freelance editorial and art photographer, put it there on Jan. 1, 2011, knowing a lot could go wrong. Mishaps could include the camera being stolen, which has happened in some of his earlier time-exposure experiments.

“The biggest difficulty,” he explained, “is trying to ensure the camera will be there when you return.

“As I’ve become more brazen with regard to installing them in more public or more populated areas, more and more cameras have gone missing. I mark down the dates to retrieve the cameras on a calendar; it is such a slow process that the best thing I can do is forget about the cameras so I don’t obsess about them.”

The nature of the exposure will likely result in a muddy look. There will be no shadows, no sun flares off windows. The cumulative effect of a moving light — that would be the sun and moon — will flatten the image.

The most intriguing aspect of the photo, said Chrisman, may be the “trails left by the sun as it moves through the sky both throughout the day and as the seasons change.”

Chrisman uses photosensitive paper in his cameras, as opposed to film, because it is less sensitive to light. A typical daylight exposure with a pinhole camera loaded with film is several seconds long, or less.

Even so, with the length of Chrisman’s exposures, the paper is extremely overexposed. There is no need to use chemicals to bring up the image. After so long, it is there on its own and visible to the naked eye.

“If I were to try to develop the paper in a traditional darkroom, the image would be lost,” said Chrisman.

Instead, he uses a scanner to capture the image from the paper, and in doing so, destroys the paper image itself. “The bright light of the scanner slowly erases the image, inch by inch, as it captures it.”

What took a year to make is gone in moments, but lives on in a digital form.

“Time is always a major component in photography, but is usually dealt with in fractions of a second,” writes Chrisman, explaining his interest in lengthy exposures. “Exploring the limits of the medium is part of what drew me to attempting this photograph.

“These photos are a constant experiment, and with each test taking months or years, it is a very slow experiment.”

One that involves a bit of luck, as well.

Edited by The Pagemeister
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