Longest known exposure photograph ever captured using a beer can | Hacker News Reader

Longest known exposure photograph ever captured using a beer can

herts.ac.uk

610 pointslnguyen107 comments

When I was in college I spent a summer abroad at an art school in the south of France. It was a medieval village, and so instead of dorms everyone was scattered in various places throughout this village on a hillside.

Anyway, a couple of our classmates turned their entire room into a pinhole camera — a “camera obscura”, where the image of the whole valley was projected upside down on the wall.

It was pretty magical being inside of that.

It's camera obscura, not obscure.

Thanks - typo: fixed.

I accidentally turned the bedroom of an apartment I once lived in into a camera obscura. There was an annoying streetlight outside and I wanted it darker at night, and the view was only of a parking lot, so I blocked off the window with a big piece of plywood, but it was about 1 inch too short, and the blinds behind it left also left about 1 inch uncovered, so there was about a 1 inch by 1 inch opening left uncovered. And funny enough, I didn't lose the view of the parking lot, as it was projected upside down on the opposite wall.

I stayed at a quirky hotel in Amsterdam where all of the rooms had different themes. The theme for this room was camera obscura. One wall had these large windows that had metal doors to totally seal out the light but the door in the middle had a small hole to make the camera obscura. The next morning we had a pretty cool shot of the buildings nearby. I hadn't ever actually seen a camera obscura before so I had no idea it looked as good as it does.

https://ibb.co/Lt60R7v

That's incredible!

Is it fair to say that the image is always there, but lost in a wash of additional light, and that a camera obscura filters out the other light, revealing the image that is already there? Or does a camera obscura somehow shape the light in a new way to produce the image?

I might say that there are an infinite number of copies of the image always there, all washing each other out. Each is a slightly different image (each has a slightly different centre of projection, in the jargon). If your pinhole is infinitely small, you get an infinitely-weak shot of a single one of those images. As you enlarge the pinhole, you get a larger collection of images, all added together, so you get more total light, but a bit of blurriness (because the images you're adding are all just a touch different).

I think a useful term is "circle of confusion".

http://fslashd.com/2015/04/circles-of-confusion/

http://www.villageinframe.com/how-big-should-the-hole-be-in-...

This is a useful image. https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e92438d691243116d52f99...

It’s always there in the same way the Mona Lisa is always there on a wire sheet of paper, and just needs the extra spectrum masked out with paint.

There was a really cool moment in an Nvidia RTX demo (rtx = hardware accelerated raytracing effecs), where they created and showed a camera obscura in the game Minecraft -- https://youtu.be/opCDN2jkZaI?t=432 (7:12 if the timestamp doesn't work).

Supposedly this was something the Nvidia devs were not necessarily expecting to see but happened to stumble upon it. In other words, it arose naturally from their treating light as physical rays rather than being programmed in, and if so I think that's pretty neat.

There are quite a few historical camera obscura. Examples:

https://www.torretavira.com/en/what-is-a-camera-obscura/#jp-... (uses a mirror to project an image on a table surface, and allows one to rotate the tower containing the pinhole. Uses a lens, so this is a camera obscura, but I’m not sure whether to call it a pinhole camera)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Obscura,_Edinburgh

There's on in Santa Monica, California, as well[0]. Tourists walk by it all the time and probably just think it's a café with a funky name.

[0]https://www.santamonica.gov/arts/camera-obscura-art-lab

San Francisco too! The hours are a bit of a mystery to me, but one day I saw someone in the booth collecting entrance fees and finally got to go inside. Probably will have to wait until after covid to go inside again though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Obscura_(San_Francisc...

A few lifetimes ago I had a tiny apartment on a busy street in Brooklyn. I slept all hours so I had cardboard over my bedroom windows. There was a hole in the cardboard that on some days with the right light ended up projecting the busy street into my room. It was pretty amazing to hear all the sounds of a busy Brooklyn street below and watch it play out upside down on my dresser.

Those are amazing. My 1st year drawing teacher at RISD, Nicholas Evans-Cato (http://www.georgebillis.com/nicholas-evans-cato.html), taught us how to draw using cameras. We built our own camera obscuras from cardboard (about the size of a watermelon) and then made landscape paintings by looking at the image projected inside the camera as opposed to looking at the landscape directly.

With his mentorship I then got into other "primitive photography" methods like pinhole cameras. My favorite thing I made was a camera that had a vertical slit, as opposed to a pinhole, and a gear system that would pull 35mm film across the slit as the camera was rotated on a base. It was effectively a panoramic camera, but the cool thing is you could follow moving objects like cars and stretch them out.

RISD campus: https://i.imgur.com/VoONn1W.jpg

Stretched out cars: https://i.imgur.com/Gm6LMRE.jpg

See how on the far right, the front wheel of the minivan is a regular circle while the back is a long oval.

That was a very fun hobby, I expect to pick it up again when I have more free time.

Not sure if it’s apocryphal or not, but I remember hearing that that was how Vermeer painted.

Tim's Vermeer.

Ha, that's awesome. I will certainly be trying the moving slit trick on my slr in long exposure mode.

Weren't some of the sequences in 2001 shot similarly? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography

If so, that's really cool and I didn't know that! Thanks for the link.

I accidentally did that in a projection room with a friend when I was aged about 10.

We blocked up the projection hole but missed a bit. Turning round to the see the hall outside projected upside down on the back wall was one of the most magical bits of serendipitous learning I have ever experienced.

A Finnish company makes these kits for just that: https://bonfoton.com/

I visited this town! SCAD has done a great job and the students were lovely. What a magical place to study abroad.

You can buy solarcans that will produce a similar capture

https://solarcan.co.uk/

https://solarcan.co.uk/matrix is absolutely beautiful.

I have to imagine this is exactly the product the student used. It’s cool someone made a business out of this idea. It actually sounds fun, I might like to get one!

Probably not, the student placed their camera in 2012 and solarcan began their kickstarter in 2017.

Oh yeah, good point.

There are a couple of people on reddit[1] who take some neat photos like that (but with 1-4 years of exposure time and not 8).

[1] This one for example: https://old.reddit.com/user/Solargraphy/submitted/?sort=top

Unfortunately there have been instances of solar cameras being reported as bombs. Police even “detonated” one with a robot a few years ago here in Atlanta. https://petapixel.com/2015/02/02/looks-like-someones-solargr...

Talk about being confused; show up to look at the results and there is just black burn marks all around... haha

This is extremely cool.

It makes me think if you were an alien life form who lived for eons, maybe eight years would be like an eye-blink (in some sense), and perhaps this is one of the perspectives you would have, if you wanted it.

You know how successful artists often have a line or series that they return to and that really identifies them? I hope this is or can become that for her.

Dragons’s Egg [1] is a great sci-fi novel that explores this concept in the other direction.

Humans are the slow ones and the Aliens are creatures living on the surface of a neutron star. Humanity makes contact and generations of the aliens live, die, and develop technology over the course of several subjective days for the humans.

Highly recommend giving it a read~

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/263466

Thanks, I'll check it out! :) ;p xx

There's a ST:TNG episode in a similar vein, Blink of an Eye, although this involves different techobabble (tachyon field).

Minor nitpick, that episode is Voyager, not Next Generation. And it was directly inspired by Dragon's Egg.

Oops. You're right. I remembered it as TNG and didn't notice when I looked up the episode name. Wikipedia says "believed to be inspired by" but it would surprise me quite a bit if it weren't.

I didn't love Voyager overall but it had some pretty good episodes scattered throughout.

I'm watching this episode now and it's great! Thank god for Netflix and all the Star Treks on it. :) ;p xx

Time Trap is a campy sci-fi movie that explores a similar concept, teenagers get trapped in a cave where time elapses differently. Not highly recommended, but it’s good fun.

What qualifies as the longest exposure ever? Does it have to result in a photo of something distinguishable? Surely there's an old camera out there with a broken shutter that's been exposing some piece of film for decades, even though it's just an entirely exposed piece of film at this point

One can argue that light degrading a centuries old stone wall counts as a long exposure photograph.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some examples of this but I can't find them now. Besides the better-known pinhole photography, there is also pinspeck photography, and some random object standing in front of the wall could perform the function of the pinspeck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinspeck_camera

(p.s. you seem to be shadowbanned)

> (p.s. you seem to be shadowbanned)

Then how can you see and reply to my post?

Because I vouched for it first (requires some amount of karma I think).

Is this a normal thing for new accounts?

I really can't think of what I did to deserve a shadow ban.

From what I gather, there are some anti-abuse filters that can sometimes affect otherwise good accounts. When this happens, the best thing to do is vouch for the comments you think are good and contact the mods using the Contact link in the footer.

This reminded me of the “nuclear silhouettes” or “human shadow of death”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone

This just sent me down such a rabbit hole. Photo-light and graphs-drawing, like, at the risk of sounding like a stoned teenager : i was extrapolating from your comment in my head to like isn’t everything from our skin tone to the natural colors where we live in a sense photography. A very nice brain vacation on a Saturday morning quarantined on a grey rainy day

Related, there likely is a forgotten structure somewhere that worked as camera obscura for decades; perhaps a dark room with a single bullet hole in the wall, forgotten since World War 2.

Would be interesting if we ever found such a case where a discernible image got burned on the wall.

* known to humankind? * successfully developed?

Key word is 'known'. The people who write uni press releases must get good at weasel words.

Looks like the photographer only said "It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence", and they took it from there

I don’t think ‘known’ really qualifies as a “weasel word” in this context. To me, “weasel word” is a somewhat wishy-washy or putatively unnecessary qualifier designed to weaken a statement in a way that allows the statement to be phrased in a way that seems much stronger. “Dozens of supporters” meaning “25 people” is weaselly; “virtual unanimity” instead of “99.9% support” is not always weaselly (though it could be depending on the context); “largest known in the observable universe” instead of “the largest we’ve happened to spot in a telescope” is not at all weaselly.

In this context: “are you sure it’s the longest long-exposure in the world? Have you checked every single camera or device that employs a camera obscura technique?” isn’t a very reasonable objection. And “known” isn’t a weasel word so much as a tautological qualifier. It doesn’t weaken the statement in anyway, it just clarifies that the author is not ominiscient.

If the headline was “believed to be one of the longest” because they were aware of a longer long-exposure, that would be much more weaselly.

They don't know for sure. From the article:

>It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence.

I would say a fully exposed piece of film is not really a photograph any more, or perhaps we can discard it as a "trivial" case.

On the other hand, there is certainly a surveillance camera somewhere quietly humming along for way longer than this, and you could make a photograph by simply averaging all the video frames.

> On the other hand, there is certainly a surveillance camera somewhere quietly humming along for way longer than this, and you could make a photograph by simply averaging all the video frames.

Sure, but that's a different thing, even if the effect is similar.

I once noticed how a newspaper would become yellow, except for square covered by a magazine. So I put newspaper with a large unprinted area in an old camera, left it exposed for a week and behold, it did show a vague skylines. Later I used red post-its, since red really bleaches in sun. Also worked, though not significant better.

A fun experiment.

How come this wasn’t completely over-exposed after so long?

Maybe if you make the pinhole the right size and match the ISO of the paper? I can barely get digital photography exposures right lol.

Yeah maybe it was just a really tiny hole!

It’s strange though because you usually need to figure out how long the exposure would be and then use the right size hole / paper. But this sounded like it was accidentally left for all this time.

I wonder how much post-processing they had to do?

From the instruction manual [1] for the Solarcan (a premade product that operates on the same principle), it appears pretty much all you do is scan the image and then invert it. Take a look at the images in the PDF - they're pretty cool.

[1] https://solarcan.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/solarcan-t...

There's a few different actions. First, since it isn't developed the paper effectively acts extremely slowly. Whereas normal photographic paper would be around 6 or up to 20 ISO, doing it this way is almost immeasurably slow. Getting similar results without a pinhole and just something layed on top (photogenic drawing), it would take several hours in direct sun to get a decent image. The next contributing factor is that some papers "print out" easier than others. The hard ones will take hours in direct sunlight, while the easier ones might take "only" 30 minutes or so. The final factor is that pinhole is a very slow and low contrast method of exposure. Silver halide paper suffers from "repricocity failure" where basically during a very long exposure, the material becomes massively less sensitive. This is why film is so hard for astrophotography. A 100 ISO film over several hours can become something more like 1 ISO. Either way, the end result is that the paper gets very slow and gains a very wide exposure latitude, nearly impossible to over expose.

You can push/pull photographic chemistry a couple stops... and for photo paper I think you can push/pull a bit more than regular C41 color film.

The way this technique works is not a standard film photographic exposure, the paper responds very differently in this process to normal processes. In effect what you have is the Sun burning a line onto the paper. This actually means that you don’t need to develop or fix the paper afterwards either. However, the final print does not last very long - the paper is still light sensitive when you take it out of the can so you need to scan it rapidly, in a dark room.

Here's a quote from the Solarcan (a premade product that uses the same principle) instructions:

> Inside the Solarcan is a single sheet of light sensitive photographic paper. Once exposed to light a chemical reaction happens to the emulsion and it begins to change colour. Traditionally photographic paper captures a latent image that is not visible to the naked eye and requires chemical processing, however with a Solarcan the light from the Sun is so powerful that as it passes across the paper it darkens visibly and no chemicals will be required to ‘develop’ the image.

https://solarcan.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/solarcan-t...

It's a beautiful image having the quality of capturing an astronomic event over time. Could it perhaps be used to tell us something about the solar system?

I remember my astronomy and maths teacher, Franck W. Pettersen, rest his soul, teaching us how to build a telescope from scratch. We got a long cardboard tube, and some other pieces that we put together quite cheaply. The most expensive part was the lens, which we put at the end of the tube.

Earlier he worked as the director of the Northeren Lights Planetarium in Tromsø, but he quit the job, citing that it was much more rewarding to teach astronomy and physics to pupils rather than showing tourists around.

It is perhaps unseremonious, but the first use the telescope saw, was us boys trying to peek at the girls at the neighbouring high school, three kilometres away at Kongsbakken (King's Hill) accross the sound. It was a success. We could even read what the teachers there wrote on the blackboards with it.

Personally I've always liked night photography, and I've spent many hours making time lapse photography of the Aurora Borealis phenomena that is so common in the North of Norway. However I think this image is a testament to how also daylight photography of certain phenomena might also be very beautiful, and even moving.

That is a fascinating picture to look at. I wonder how much data could be reconstructed from image analysis?

If we knew enough about the structure of the aluminum and the method of recording I suppose some people might say, "everything."

As cool as it would be, there is a lot of information lost and some overwritten.

Think of it as a one way hash...

If it had only run for one year you’d be able to reconstruct the weather- or at least the cloudy days. 8 years probably mashes the data too much.

Link with the photographer and the can...

https://petapixel.com/2020/12/11/shot-with-a-beer-can-this-i...

Is it the longest known exposure ever, or longest ever with a beer can?

The (very short) article clarifies the title is suggesting this could be the longest exposure ever. And just happens to have been taken using a beer can — which is important because the metal can is better at withstanding the elements for such a long time than photographic paper. The title could have maybe used a comma before “using a beer can” to clarify.

TL;DR: Eight years of sun arcs were captured using long exposure solargraphy [1] at a teaching observatory near London. The pinhole camera was forgotten and left out longer than the typical 6-12 months.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-exposure_photography#Sola...

this has a picture of her beer can camera

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/photography/2020/12/lon...

I’m just glad she’s alive, the article made me think she was no longer alive.

Reading the last paragraph, I did not come away with the same impression you did: "Regina is now a photography technician at Barnet and Southgate College."

I think OP meant the past tense they used when talking about Regina. The last paragraph did clear the confusion.

And the fact that it was "discovered" which makes it sound like it was found in a dead person's lab or something. The article really gives the impression that she's dead, which is odd if that's not what is intended.

Yes, the article is definitely in need of an editor's touch.

The sentence "She placed a can on one of the Observatory’s telescopes, which had been forgotten about until September this year ..." makes it sound like it was the telescope that had been forgotten.

There are several traces of light that don't seem to be made by the sun, a zigzag pattern running vertically on the right among other things. Wonder what those could be?

perhaps internal reflection within the beer can

Possibly "...the atmospheric gantry, built halfway through the exposure, can be seen from the centre to the right."

My guess is meteors. Some can be very bright, and over the course of 8 years it's quite likely to have captured at least a few bright ones.

You don't risk "overexposing" (as the article says) anything with film/paper; basically you reach the "reciprocity failure" where the rule of exposure fails, and you can pretty much ignore the exposure time /completely/ at that point. Double it? fine. 4 times? still fine :-)

I've done many 30 minutes+ exposures on both pinhole and large format cameras. On the later, it captures an insane amount of tonalities from what you are imaging, almost like "HDR" but well, with just a piece of carboard for shutter and a watch to time how long your patience lasts :-)

In fact the term HDR (High Dynamic Range) originates from film scanners and the data formats used to preserve this detail.

Decades before anyone had an HDR TV, film frames were being stored in HDR formats for digital processing.

You sound like a guy I know who builds 2 element lenses using dollar bills for the barrel.

The next logical step is to string hundreds of beer cans together to create a time-lapse stop-motion film on the order of years.

Is it only me who found the title misleading? I thought it was a record for can-exposed photos only.

What's specific about the beer can? Couldn't any material be used for a pinhole camera?

The beer can is round and somewhat easy to reseal. The round part is important, as the photo paper will be wrapped around the interior[1] for a wide field of view without a lot of distortion.

[1] https://www.instructables.com/Solargraphy/

I am surprised photographic paper will last that long while being undeveloped.

Flat earth, busted again.

Photographer: “check out my really long exposure”.

Regina: “Hold my beer”.

What does this comment add to the thread?

It’s a joke.

See here for more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hold-my-beer

This is really amazing and interesting!

I want to make my own but where can i get photographic paper?

ebay eg https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057...

Interesting

That's a weirdly specific headline.

It is ambiguous. Add a ’was’ after ’ever’.

Indeed, I didn't know that long exposure beer can photography was a thing.

Well, if it the longest exposure ever captured I guess it would also make it the longest exposure ever captured using a beer can.

This is similar to the "_______ DESTROYS ___________" in YouTube videos. It's one way of getting likes/upvotes/karma points. It has to draw attention somehow. It has to have some weird thing (unexplained to the eyes of the author), a rare event (a Black Swan?) or something that is highly controversial so gets the discussion going. It has been like that since the first headline on the first newspaper ever made by man (perhaps earlier, under other medium).

I find it very interesting though

It is, indeed... I was just pointing out how they draw attention nowadays (ever?).

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