I recently got a pinhole sent in by Michael McAuley from Houston, Texas. His daughter Alanna had taken my digital class at Photographic Center NW and he came on a shoot with us in Georgetown one night. I gave him the pinhole that night, and it was a long time ago (more than two years I believe). He took the camera to Ireland, before the pandemic and put it there thinking he would be back in a few months. He finally returned last July and took the camera down and sent it to me. The paper was destroyed by rain I think and could not even be taken from the camera at all
Here is a quote from an email that Michael sent to me.
“The story of my camera is a bit convoluted and pandemic related. We have a vacation home in Ireland, and I set it up on a fencepost there maybe two years ago in summer 2019 in our garden with a nice view of a field that gets a setting sun every (sunny) day. We usually get back there twice a year or so, however, with the pandemic we only got back to the house in Oct. 2020 after about 14 months away. The post fell down in the meantime and the camera fell off the post at some point, so I put it back up on the post during that Oct. trip. Then the UK and Ireland had a second Covid wave, preventing us from getting there in March 2021, so we just got over there again in late July when the UK opened up. I had actually forgotten about the camera until I saw it just before we returned home a couple of weeks ago, but I grabbed it and then mailed it back to you when we got home.
The poor camera has been through a lot and got a good dose of the Irish weather, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised about the way it turned out. But it would have been glorious! I’ll let you hold onto it and put it out of its misery.”
I post this because it is a good example of what can and might happen to your cameras. Besides getting stolen, they can get wet, really wet or open up or just disappear or be forgtotten. The paper negative lasts a long time. You can use cameras that were loaded several years ago.. We all put cameras out with positive hopes and dreams about what it might be. Leaving the camera out always contains risk. I left a camera in Northern California several years ago and thought I would be back very soon. It was two years later when I went back but the camera was placed under a bridge (The Hadley bridge near Honeydew in Northern California) and survived that crazy length of time fine. It was in a dry place and the difference in my camera and Michael’s was no rain got on mine. The cameras are built to withstand some rain but not years and years of it. I did not expect that this image would usable image but it has it’s purpose. The front of the camera did slip down a little; it was facing down not straight ahead as I thought. Still I was glad it was what it was. The second image I am posting is of a camera that I put up for about six months at a place in the Olympic National Forest called The Top of the World. This camera kept falling down and good Samaritans kept picking it back up and putting in place. I thank them profusely and you can see how many times it fell because of the sun trails. I found it and it was pinhole down in some snow and I thought it was not going to be useful. Both of these images are not at all recognizable. I always say there are no bad pinholes and as long as you keep learning from the images, no bad ones exist. The third image is by Liam Topham. He wanted to try an underwater photograph so he taped the camera to a piling. It was left there so long that the camera was completely full of water. We managed to get the paper out and scan it after it had dried. Another example of a bad pinhole that is good.
But back to Michael’s image. I could not get what was left of the paper out of the camera. So I put the whole thing down on the scanner. It is a bit more out of focus than usual but I think you can still see it. It turns out that the messed up image is pretty interesting. I give you that here too.
So this is the take away. Place the cameras where you know you can retrieve them. Try to keep them away from the weather as much as possible. Heat is the enemy of the pinhole image too. But please continue to take photographs with these crazy tiny altoid tins. Take a look at the website and you can see lots of mistakes that are great. You never know what might happen.
Michael McAuley’s camera and how it looked when I opened the camera up. Paper was so deteriorated that it could not be taken out. I scanned the whole thing mainly to show Michael what it looked like but then decided it was a learning moment and wanted to share it.
