Hi I'm Rachel from Little Vintage Photography.
I invented something called the Analogue Adventurer Kit.
Here we go. You can see that here.
And inside the kit you get all the materials you'd need
in order to make your own cyanotype sunprint.
So things like this bookmark and a 6x4 print
and also to make your own pinhole viewer which looks a bit like a telescope
that you would look through in order to see the world upside down.
You'll be able to pick up one of the Analogue Adventurer Kits
from littlevintagephotography.co.uk
Alternatively you'll be able to find the materials to make
a pinhole viewer for yourself
from around the house or from your local stationary shop.
What I'm going to show you next is how to build your own pinhole viewer.
So although it doesn't take a photograph, it's a way of seeing
what would be going on inside a pinhole camera like this.
You'll be able to see how the physics of light works
and there's no batteries, no electricity, no mirrors or anything like that.
It's quite a magical process that'll show you how to flip the world upside down
and what would be happening inside a camera.
So that's the activity we're going to concentrate on today,
I'll talk you through it step by step, but first, here's a list of materials that you'll need.
We'll start with the black piece of card,
so thin card or heavyweight paper.
We need to put the rest of these pieces out of the way just for now.
So this is our starting point, we're gonna take our ruler and our pencil
and what we're going to do is
we'll measure along the long edge 7cm,
and then make a mark and then the same at the bottom edge
on the long side,
again measure 7cm and make a mark there.
Using those guide mark join a line between the 2.
We're going to take our scissors and cut that strip off the end of the A4 piece.
So we've now got a strip and a larger piece of paper.
We're going to put the large piece to one side for now,
and concentrate on the smaller strip.
What we want to do is bend this round in order to create a cylinder,
a small cylinder, like that.
And again we can take our ruler and have a little look at the diameter
and what we're going to aim for is a 5cm diameter,
so that's obviously across the middle of the tube itself.
So something around there will be our ideal point for sticking.
What I like to do is put the Sellotape straight along here
and then just tuck in the ends because it will actually help
to make it a little bit stronger as a tube and it will stop it from unravelling.
Once we've got our little tube, we can put that to one side and
we're gonna do exactly the same with our larger piece.
We don't want it to go inside or outside,
we want them to be about the same diameter.
So we've got a nice tube there, large one here, small one here
and we know they're both going to be approximately 5cm diameter.
I'm gonna put the large tube out of the way.
I'm now going to bring in my piece of tracing paper.
Ok, so we use this sort of semi-transparent, semi-opaque tracing paper
in order to create what would be, on a digital camera, the screen
that you look at the image on.
So this is actually going to be the screen where the image will be projected.
You put your small tube in the centre of the piece of tracing paper.
Take your pencil, you're gonna hold that just gently,
and just lightly you're going to trace around the outer edge of your small tube.
It doesn't have to be particularly perfect or neat,
it's just to get a general size of the tube that you've got, or the circle you've got.
So there you go, I'm just going to add a little bit of extra.
Once you've got your centre circle, I'm gonna go all the way to the edge here
and create a larger circle that goes all the way to the edge on both sides.
It's basically now a ring doughnut with some sprinkles.
I'm going to put my pencil down to one side and pick up my scissors.
Now the next step is to just cut the outside edge.
So what we can do with our ring doughnut
is we can now turn it into a flower,
by cutting a series of petals.
From the outside edge we can cut into the centre circle
but don't cut the centre circle, move it round do the same again, make another petal,
and keep on doing this all the way around the outside edge.
There we go.
Put the scissors down to one side as you can see I've now got
this lovely flower with all its lovely petals.
The helpful thing about that is that when I very gently just press this down
you can see that it will now sit quite well
around the edge of a cylinder.
I'm going to press this very gently down with this hand,
holding the tape with the other.
This bit can be a little bit fiddly so just take your time
or see if you can find an extra pair of hands, somebody to help you
just to make sure that you don't get too frustrated with it.
Just nice and gently and we now have an area that's going to be our screen.
So when we actually attach this and finish off the pinhole viewer itself
that will be where we will see the image on the screen here.
We're going to attach the small tube to the large tube.
We need to make sure that we've got those two sort of facing each other.
The screen's facing to the top of the large tube, so that's just going to hold it in place.
I could start to have a quick check and see if that's actually held on.
Okay yep lovely.
Now what I'm going to need to do now is add some black electrical tape
to seal that gap because obviously there's a gap with lots of light getting in here.
I can add this to that gap and start to seal it up.
It's all looking pretty good!
So we've got our pinhole viewer nearly ready to use.
Last couple of steps, one of the main ones is taking the aluminium foil so
again in the kit I have the aluminium foil,
I tend to use the stronger version just to make sure it doesn't tear particularly easily,
and I fold it into this little little packet
as it actually helps make it a little bit easier to use.
So I'm going to open it up now
and you can see that because I've folded it like that the easy place to place our
pinhole viewer is actually just in that centre square, so you just need to make sure that
you do this the correct way around.
So what we'll do is we'll look through this end - the end of the long tube
then there'll be the screen here which is where we'll see the image projected
and then at this end will be our foil, okay.
So just need to make sure that you're putting it onto the correct end.
I'm gonna place this on now.
You can do it one of two ways you can place it like so and lift the foil up
or you can put your tube here and put it on top so I'm going to do that
and very gently you're just going to smooth the foil down.
once you have your foil just very gently placed around the end of the tube,
I'm going to take the
all-important elastic bands
like so, and these are going to fit over the end to hold it in place.
You need to make sure it's completely light tight inside in order for it to work.
The very very last stage is simply to add the pinhole to our pinhole viewer.
And to do that what I tend to do is take a map pin something like this,
again I have them in the kit, and just take a deep breath,
hold my breath and place one pin hole right in the centre of the tube itself.
Okay so I'm just going to do that now.
That's going to go in there excellent.
So now we have our pinhole in the end of our tube,
we will look through this end, we've got the screen that's in the centre,
the light is coming in through the pinhole here.
What you're best to do is to take your pinhole viewer
and to close one eye, put it up against the other eye
and make sure you've got your hand really tight cupped against the tube itself
and against your cheek so that you haven't got any extra light coming in
out from the edges, from the sides so you want to make sure it's really close,
tight to your face, keep your hands like this
to make sure that you've got again a little seal here,
so that you're not letting in extra light and close your other eye.
So what you'll want to do is take your your tube and look out of the window,
and you'll see the trees upside down, houses upside down and as you know
obviously, we've built this from scratch, so there's no batteries in there,
there's no electricity and it's simply the physics of light
which has meant that the image has turned upside down
and that is the magic of pinhole photography.
If you've got any questions about analogue photography processes,
alternative techniques, if you want to try out a few more things or have any questions,
drop me a line I am on
littlevintagephotography.co.uk
and I look forward to hearing from you soon.