 |
 Impressions
de Lumière - from an artist in residency at L'Arbre de Vie / Chateau de Blacons, France - 2007 - Lloyd
Godman- © Lloyd Godman
Construction
& installation of Chambre Noire - 2007
 |
|
 |
There
was a problem getting this to sit exactly level and we had
to use some temporary braces on the side to stabilize the
structure upright. The large newspaper leaf shapes were laid on the ground to begin the process of growing images in the grass. |
 |
22
Aug 2007
the timber supports that will be wired onto the were painted
black to match the structure and the lining. During the
next morning there was a down pour of heavy rain and some
of the paint was washed off.
View
from the window of the 4th floor of the Chateau locating
the leaf forms and the structure. |
 |
24
Aug 2007
I spent the morning trying to track down a larger image
file in Australia that we could use for the poster and invite.
This seemed to take for ever with on resolution by the end
of the day. Tess left for Sweden and in the afternoon I
moved up to stay at the Chateau in the Gîte.
|
 |
By
the time I had arrived at the Chateau from Crest, Cédric had installed some
of the wooden frame work and the door. |
 |
We
had to put a cross brace at the end to keep the structure
vertical. |
 |
By the late afternoon, Cédric, Beatrice and myself
finished off the wooden components of the structure. |
 |
We
had lots of wonderful support from Celeste, their 9 month
old daughter who is the dearest little girl - always smiling and a real delight. |
 |
We
kept working into the evening installing the first sheets
of black plastic on the structure. |
 |
By
8pm when we sat down for the evening meal, the 2 end walls
had been covered with black plastic. |
|
Daniel
Van de Velde, who had worked at the Chateau arrived to pick
up his fascinating hollow trees works that adorned various parts of the garden. With Daniel staying over
the night in the Gîte with me we had a good talk about his work and the garden project he was working on. He was due to deinstall his work the next day. |
 |
25
Aug 2007
The next day more plastic is applied to the structure until it is completely blacked out with plastic. |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
The view from within the darkened structure through the aperture of the door to the garden
|
 |
In
the process of installing there were a few small holes in
the plastic, each one of these operated like a pinhole camera.
I experimented with a large white cardboard sheet, placing
it on oblique angle to the wall with the aperture, and photographing both the projected
image and the pinhole.
Although the image was hardly perceptive to the naked eye, with an extended exposure of about 30 seconds the images recorded well with the digital camera. There are three fundamental aspects of photography made clear by this image.
1. any image from an aperture like these pinholes is vertically and laterally reversed, (upside down and back to front) you will notice the image is upside down.
|
|
2. the further and wider the light projects the more it falls off, this is also linked to the next aspect - perspective. Because there is only the same amount of light falling on a larger surface area the illumination is diminishes. So, the image is brighter closer to the pinhole ( A) and less intense further away ( B). |
 |
3. the closer to the pinhole the smaller the image while the further away larger the image - this works in exactly the same way we might use the movement of a view camera to correct perspective. In the drawing the projected lines once passed through the pinhole alter - B becomes longer than A. |
| |
There is also a fourth fundamental of photography - the wider the opening that lets the light through the less sharp the projected image - and like wise the smaller the aperture the greater the sharpness.
|
 |
I
made a portrait of Beatrice sitting in front with the Chateau
projected onto the cardboard. |
 |
I
also made a portrait of Evelyn sitting in front with the
Chateau projected onto the cardboard. |
 |
As I began to sketch out the design each pinhole
projected an image of the scene outside - here we see four images
of the Chateau. Notice the pinholes on the wall. As more and more pinholes were made in the fabric of the structure the images became more and more confused until it reached a point where the only reference were the circles of light which were the sun projected from each pinhole image. |
|
Here
the board is held up to a pinhole in the roof and the trees
and sky photographed with a digital camera. |
 |
This is a multiple pinhole image of the sky projected onto a card - this image was taken at a later installation at Yering Station in Oct 2008 |
| |
|
 |
|
 |
One
of Daniel Van de Velde's work installed in the garden of the Chateau.
|
|
|
 |
Later
in the afternoon I began pricking out the image on the plastic.
|
|
26
Aug 2007
The black polythene as like black carbon particles in the atmosphere, it stops some wavelengths of radiation form the sun (light) and lets others through (heat). This is exactly what is happening to the planet with carbon emissions, while heat is radiated through the particles of black carbon, the photons or light are actually reduced. As photons are implicated in evaporation the planet gets warmer but there might also be less rain.
Very early in the morning I resumed pricking out the images in the
black plastic. However the heat became incredible the
sun grew stringer and I had to wait until later in the day.
|
| |
|
 |
27
Aug 2007
By 10 am the work was nearly complete and the sun was projecting
images across the floor and walls. Of course the abstract
projection patterns were in constant change as the sun moved
across the sky.
|
 |
The myriad of pinholes projected a series of small circles onto the ground and walls - which interacted with the real pinholes in the wall and roof. The lines of light projected on the floor are actually mad up of thousands of individual circles of light, and each one is the sun from a pinhole image. |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
When you place your eye close to the wall the scene outside is revealed as a series of circles. |
 |
When this is photographed with a small aperture - f22 @1/10 second each of the holes is recorded as a separate circle. |
 |
However when the aperture is opened up with the focus set on infinity - f4.2 @1/60 second - due to the circles of confusion, or unsharpness of each of the pinholes they over lap. |
 |
Here we see the lines of pinholes projected onto the ground - |
 |
In this image leaves of tress fall across the area where the sun is in the pinhole image - Each one is slightly different because of its position - in some there are no leaves over the sun - so the circle is complete. It was fascinating watching these move in unison in the wind - |
|
Sept 2008
This is an image of the Carbon Obscura in Canberra, looking through the pinholes to the trees out side.
I have been experimenting much more with the fog and light inside the carbon obscura - when there are hundreds of pinholes the only reference we see is the small circle of light that are the sun in thousands of pinhole images. The other representations that we might see when there is only one pinhole, are imperceptible because the light overlaps too much and diffuses the image. |
| |
Circle of illumination - each circular image projected through the pinholes falls off in illumination towards the perimeter - this is called the circle of illumination and happens with all lenses - Normally we ar not aware of this because the camera frame is designed to crop only a section of the projected image.
|
| |
Image sharpnesss - with a pinhole camera, the sharpness of the image is dertermined by the diamiter of the opening or aperture
- |
| |
Focal length - the focal length of a pinhole image is determined by the distance between the pinhole and the projection screen or sensitive material
- |
 |
So each ray of light in an image like this is a projection of the sun in a separate pinhole image - |
 |
When we see a similar effect with sun rays streaming through the leaves of trees in morning fog, what is actually happening in the image is the gaps in the leaves of the tree are producing tiny apertures like a pinhole image and each ray of light is a projection of the sun, similar to the carbon obscure pinholes. So in a situation like this the leaves are actually forming a multitude o natural cameras - its just we cant see the other projections. |
 |
So in this image of the light coming through the foliage cover across the window of the Chateau creates a pattern in the series of light patches. However, when I looked closer on the left hand side of the window recess I could see the diffused reference of the scene outside - the blue of the sky outside, through the leaves of the plants across the window. |
 |
This is a photograph of an incidental pinhole camera image I found in one of the exhibition spaces at the Sydney Biennial July 2008. It was form from a small opening in a roller door projecting across a wall. As the image from an aperture is vertically and laterally reversed, (upside down and back to front) you will notice the image is upside down. We see the blue sky and clouds on the right of the image. This is also larger on the right because of the perspective.
There were 2 chains across where the image was projected, which created corresponding shadow images on the wall. So in a sense the projection became both a pinhole image and a photogram.
|
|
Sept 2008 -
Waiting for the light-
So many people mentioned to me a strong spiritual connection from the rays of light in the Carbon Obscura work -
It kept reoccurring - several people went there to meditate - many experienced an uplifting - one even had an epiphany. While daylight is everywhere - it surrounds us, the fine threads of light in the darkened space amplified the effect. Shutting off the light in the foggy atmosphere produced a contradiction that made visible the normally imperceptible.
In thinking about the Carbon Obscura work further - I found it interesting how in normal life there is so much "light" about us that often we might not "see" with a clear vision. Because we drift along, we can be fooled into the belief that we have a clear goal.
Yet in times of difficulty, deepest darkness and the verge of despair, when things seem impossible, we might find a single opening that points the way - a pinhole that projects a clear and sharp vision in a dark space like a camera to another world beyond the darkness. Things can fall into focus in a way we had not perceived before, and when it happens, we are challenged to find the inner conviction to explore it. The darkest hour is just before the dawn when we wait for the first glimmer of light.
|
|
|
