"Millennium Camera" to take a 1k-year long-exposure photo
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
That said, that whole pitch drop experiment is going pretty well. It's not quite at 100 years, but it's getting very close. (2027). So that's 1/10th of a millenium. (I will note that the pitch drop experiment has been moved before. It's not nearly as sensitive to movement as a camera.)
Nobody's talking about the future of the world as a result of this project, they're mostly talking about the future of the project itself, and how it'll end up a wet fart because of poor planning. If the goal is to get people slapping their foreheads then it's a smashing success. Beyond that, I'm not sure what the effect will be. All press may be good press, but not all press amounts to art.
Imagine what the time value of the money spent on this will be for this in 1000 years. A market investment of $1000 that could return 2% over inflation over that time period would be equivalent to $400B in today's dollars.
So, no more impossible than having a random stick take a photograph for 1000 years. Perhaps, they'll sell 0.0000001% of the stock of a corporation that owns the photograph for $4, or it will contain the last unburnt bitcoin.
I believe that the next 150 years are not going to be like that. If for no other reason, demographic collapse will destroy the consumer base for companies.
1000 years? That bug ridden pinhole camera will be around, we won't.
My gut feeling of doing this for one year: 1000 years is just plain impossible. Not with something made out of metal with an actual hole in it. Maybe some glass capped ceramic to avoid water ingress and corrosion... but after one year, my camera was already full of weird goop.
People typically make them out of black film canisters and such. Google "solargraph"
Fairly pleased with the result, would definitely recommend having a go: https://stickyhat.com/a-6-month-pinhole-camera-exposure/
I don't think many buildings would show up, if any. I once took a 10 second pinhole camera exposure of a busy playground, and there's no sign of the children in the image at all. One kid standing still for one second would be like a building that lasts a century for this image, but they weren't visible because of the other 90% of the time.
As another posted stated, they should have started small: 1 yr, 10yrs, then maybe a 1000. Iterating each time with a better design.
Also, dump the steel. You need something more inert.
Science experiments demonstrating discoveries of the past centuries (magnetism, electricity, radio) are a kind long-term useful art.
But, it's ok, I'm certainly not saying it's bad art just because I'm on fence about it.
Personally, I don't like when art makes me contemplate the delta between _intended ideals_ vs. actual execution.
Especially for this piece... it's just fake. "We made a camera that's going to take a 1,000 year exposure!" - and it's like... maaaan. No, no you didn't - and it's unethical to market that you did.
Clearly I am in the wrong line of work.
In this case the artist used a layer of paint instead of a more traditional photosensitive material. The projected light will cause the paint to fade and change over time causing an image to appear over the course of centuries instead of minutes.
It's not as readily available in this digital age but you should still be able to find it at a "good" camera store. I'd look for maybe single owner dedicated to craft type places vs chain dedicated to tech.
You'll be wanting the B&W stuff, easier to develop and you can work with it under red lights instead total darkness. You'll also need 2 chemicals called "developer" and "fixer" suitable to the paper and distilled water to bath it in.
Pinhole cameras are fun because you can build them in less then an hour for nearly free and it gets you hands on with the underlying principles of photography.
There is a difference between taking a photo every day for 1000 years, what you end up with is, say, a 365,000 second exposure. This is an actual 1000 year exposure.
The algorithm where you take 60 1/60th second exposures over the course of a second and then stitch them together is popular. There are many mobile apps that do this and try to use edge detection / "AI" to make them line up, so you can take handheld long exposure shots. (Spectre is an iOS app, but I'm sure there are others.) You can also do it yourself with a tripod and photoshop. The results are good, and it lets you take long exposures when you are constrained by having too much light and no ND filter / tiny aperture on your lens / etc.
> Wouldn't it produce a solid white image after a single day?
In general, reciprocity holds in photography. A 1 second exposure at f/8 is the same as a 2 second exposure at f/16 given the same sensor. (Films have a technical limitation called "reciprocity failure" for long exposures. Silver halide requires TWO photons to hit each atom, and the statistics of that aren't linear. This means that film exposures depend both on the shutter speed and ISO sensitivity; a properly exposed long exposure on film will often be longer than what the math dictates. The box that your film comes in will often give you a number to multiply your calculated exposure by.)
So what they need is exceedingly low ISO film. A picture of a sunny scene would generally be exposed at f/16 and 1/<the ISO of the film>. A pinhole lens can't open that wide, they're more like f/180. That is "7 stops" less light than f/16, so would need a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds to capture the same image. Now you can see how insensitive the "film" in this camera is; it needs 31,536,000,000 seconds of exposure. That means it's 3.17e-11 ISO film they have in there. What quantum effects happen to film that insensitive, I don't know. They say it's paint fading, and I don't know what the rate is. It might end up being overexposed. (Film is usually OK being severely overexposed, the opposite of digital. No idea if paint fading behaves the same way as silver halide. Probably!)
One other thing to think about; films often have differing sensitivity to different colors of light. Early film was overly sensitive to UV light, because it contains so much more energy than red light. Modern black and white film is pretty linear over the colors of light, so you end up with a picture that looks right to your eye. Paint does not have this carefully-designed chemistry, and is probably only sensitive to UV light, so that reduces the effective ISO of this camera setup even further. It won't respond to light you can see, only UV light. But, that works well enough to yield a recognizable image. (The problem in photography is that the sky contains too much UV, and you end up with an ugly white contrast-less sky. In this case, I don't think they care.)
I think what's hard to balance is what effects other things will have. Humidity will get into the camera and the water will attack the paint. Air will be oxidizing the pigments. Bugs can probably get in and eat the paint. 1000 years is a long time! You have to hope that other effects don't destroy the image more quickly than it can be created.
Taking a photo every day is work, stuff can break. A passive sensor like paint would just sit there.
Does it need to be developed or something?
Or does the material stop being photosensitive after a few centuries?
(I mean I know this is an art project rather than something genuinely meant to last a thousand years in practice, but it seems like they're trying to make it work at least in theory.)
If i understand the principle correctly, the captured light would simply slowly fade exposed portions of the "film" over centures, eventually resulting in a faint negative of the sum total of the scenes witnessed.
Exposing the film to light at that point, one kiloyear from now, would probably do nothing, unless you left it exposed for a couple decades to direct sunlight.
Mine is just taking a picture once per day.