After some weeks looking at it, I decided last weekend to give my LEGO Mindstorms Pinhole Camera a try. We set-up a small darkroom in our bathroom to be able to load the paper into the camera and to develop it afterwards. The good thing was that we needed little space as the amplifier wasn’t needed.
It took me about 5 minutes to cut the strips of paper, load the camera roll and tape the camera box closed for the trial run. Once done, it was a bit scary to open the light, but we went to our roof terrace to make some test shots (taking advantage of the fact we had to be up there to hang our laundry up to dry).
Since I could find little information online on the exposure times to use when projecting directly onto paper, I went for pretty rough exposure times. 60 seconds and 90 seconds, each shot.
After the third shot, I missed the sound of the servo-motor controlling the film winding. Something went wrong. We took a couple of shots more, without moving the camera and decided to go down and develop the paper.
Here is the result:
I am very happy something came out, and that you can actually see a very shady and ghostly image… but an image!! A lot more than I was expecting!!
As you can see from the strips, there is some light leakage, which I don’t really mind. The images are over exposed, so I guess the exposure times should be more around 30 – 45 and 60 seconds depending on the light situation (we made these shots on a very sunny day in Barcelona). Also the as you can see from the strip above, there is a triple exposure.
The transport mechanism got stuck indeed. I believe that the main cause was the thickness of the paper, a lot thicker than the normal print paper I ran tests with.
I’ll now have a look if I can improve the transport of the paper, so it won’t get stuck and do some more tests with different exposure times…. to be continued!
Hanging up the laundry….
Possibly Related:
Technorati Tags: LEGO, Mindstorms, Photography, Pinhole
After creating a positive using 1 single Gimp function, here’s the result:
LEGO Star Wars Elite Clone Trooper and Commando Droid B 9488bBombard the Separatist forces with the Republic artillery cannon!/bThe Separatists have sent a new droid enemy to attack the forces of the Republic, ... Read More >
For quite some time I’ve been interested in the developments around the Arduino platform. After LEGO Mindstorms, I would love to give Arduino a try and build some simple prototypes of things I have in mind.
With the relative inexpensive Arduino chips, you can build to keep. This for me would be the reason I will soon buy myself a starter kit. I’ve already found a site that has a comparison chart on many starter-kits available out there: [
