We were very fortunate to have two groups of ebullient enthusiasm come and learn about pinhole photography with us in the last half of 2013.
As part of the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material conference in Adelaide in 2013, hosted by Artlab, The Analogue Laboratory offered conference attendees an opportunity to hang out and learn about the simplest kind of camera – the humble pinhole. We completely failed at taking photographs of the days antics, but fortunately some of the participants have let us use their snaps of the day.
We started off by demonstrating just how a pinhole camera works. Fortunately for us Andrew’s Giant Crate Camera was handy, so we converted it into a pinhole camera and pushed it outside for the purpose of a demonstration.
Just between you, me and the rest of the internet it’s really nice having a group of conservators in your darkroom! They are fastidiously tidy! Not only did the tongs fail to migrate to the wrong trays, but they were always exactly where you’d want them – all day long. These ladies did not mess, or drip, but made an absolutely Famous amount of pinhole negatives and positives and experimented their merry hearts out. And THEN, and then – they gave us thank you chocolate!! No no no, we thank you! But we will eat these chocolates with glee!
A few weeks later at the behest of the amazing Katie Cavenagh brought one of her Flinders University multimedia classes down to the lab to try their luck at pinholes. An entirely different element of experimentation, but this group of young gents wasted no time at all in turning our stash of paper into photographs.
