Woodland Obscura
In autumn, Westonbirt was joined by Cam Everland primary school students and artist/photographer Justin Quinnell for an inspired day of pinhole photography. He started by introducing the excited students to light, and the basics of photography – aided by the help of giant eyeballs which work as camera obscuras – flipping the image within and making it extremely hard to walk towards each other. The kids had great fun watching the teachers try them out too!
They then learnt about light-sensitive substances, by creating their own turmeric coated photo-paper, which they blocked out with cut-outs and left in the sun for later. Moving onto pinhole cameras, they were shown how even a cream-cracker with its holes can be used to create imagery with light, before each being handed a can containing a piece of photographic paper and a pinhole covered by tape.
These cans were taken outside to take self-portraits, showing how you needed to be very still for a certain amount of time for the photograph to come out. These were then developed over lunchtime for the children to use reverse colour in smartphones to view their negative portraits.
We then had a fantastic walk down through Silk Wood to the planting project area, which the children had helped with over various days planting saplings last winter and looking after them in the summer. They were all given their loaded can cameras and asked to stand near a tree of their choice.
Holding the cameras against the stakes, they then had to remove and replace the tape over the pinhole whilst trying to be as still as possible for the image to come out. This was extremely difficult but led to some interesting results – some of which you can see here.
All in all, this was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the science of light and to document the trees in a way that dates back to the earliest days of photography – tying in nicely to the time of the arboretum’s creation.
Read our other blogs about the Silk Wood Community Planting Project here...
