He makes these awesome full-room camera obscuras in his home and even hotel rooms.
I was particularly inspired by his terrain works, where he uses natural terrains and camera obscuras to mimic impressionist paintings.
This was motivated because I intend to use it in part of a longer-term project. Eventually, I want to get it to the level where I can record clear live videos through this.
This served as my first attempt at making a prototype.
I was given a fresnel lens with a focal length of 200mm but in my research, this would also work with a common magnifying glass. The only downside of this kind of substitution seemed to be that it would produce a less sharp image.
The basic setup is pretty basic, it’s essentially a box within a box with a piece of parchment paper attached to the end of the smaller box. The fresnel was attached with electrical tape and painter’s tape to a frame I had already made for another project.
Process:
During building the box, it was nighttime, so I played around using lights in the dark.
It was looking surprisingly ok.
I went ahead and finished a rough model.
Video Testing:
Further thoughts:
To expand, I want to get it to a better clarity and experiment with using different materials for the projection screen.
I saw this great video where they used frosted plastic and a portable scanner to extract the projected image, which I am super interested in pursuing.
The end goal is to have something I can run around town with and get reliable results, make content, and experiment with the form.
In this project, I was interested in going through my recorded memories and comparing the last photo of each month in my camera roll to my self-defined idea of “last”.
This project came about because I gravitated towards capturing the “moment of”. Many of the inspiration projects I came back to were projects like:
Which was a collection of photographs that took a picture every time a person went throughthe subway turnstile.
However, I felt that these references were more focused on the person than the event, and I was more interested in the event of capture.
I came across this long-term project called “Leaving and Waving” by Deanna Dikeman, where she captured photographs as she waved goodbye and drove away from visiting her parents.
“a 14-meter long installation that runs down the middle of The Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum. Its central theme is the dominance of the biomedical approach to health and illness within Western societies, here focused mainly on the use of medication.”
This made me interested like “the lasts”. Recent events in my life that have made me hyperaware of “the last” are COVID, moving homes, moving out of homes, college, deaths, illness, the election, and traveling. I was interested to see if any of these significant lasts I felt were reflected in what I’ve chosen to document over the years.
The form of Dikeman projects inspired me, but since I don’t have 10 years to make this project, so I instead turned to photos I already had to see if I could document something similar in my life.
My project statement follows:
As a whole, there is this culture of obsession around “the last”. Concepts that come to mind are the “last words”, “last meals, “last goodbyes” and “last day”. The concept of “the last” accompanies the realization of death, the ultimate “the last” in everyone’s life. The concept of “the last” often thought of as inherently special and sentimental.
Through this project, I wanted to explore “the last” in my life through a formal organization of the last photos of every month in my camera roll over the last four years. I wanted to find out what life looks like when I am just presented with a collection of photos of my “lasts”.
Process:
Originally I wanted to see if this was a task I could automate, so I went to ChatGPT (lol) for help to see if I could use the machine to sort out the images in my camera roll for me.
This proved to be difficult because of the sheer size of my camera roll and also probably some privacy issues that I couldn’t understand enough to fix.
She was running for a while before she gave up and crashed
So instead I decided to comb through the photos myself.
Process and restrictions:
The rules I defined for my process were:
Strictly the last photo/video of every month for the past 4 years.
All media, including screenshots, would count.
The process:
List out the dates
List out the last remembered memory associated with that month (Using my journals, calenders, and notes app).
Pick out the last recorded photo in my camera roll
The Results:
Final Thoughts:
To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised to find that the last things I decided to document in my life when I was unaware of the future were completely unrelated to the more significant “last” events.
My project concluded with the idea that actual “lasts” in our lives don’t matter as much as what we perceive our “lasts” are. Documenting my life in my true “the lasts” didn’t feel as significant as culturally I’d been raised to believe.
Improvements:
I originally wanted to document the last photo of every day, but that proved to be a longer endeavor than I dared to partake in. If I could figure out the code to automate that process, those would be my next steps.
It would also be interesting to see the first and last photos of every day (yes I take that many photos my camera roll/hard disk is insane) and see how my project changes from there.
I also wondered if it would have been more effective if I focused on the self (ie. last selfie etc). Perhaps for the next update, I will explore this as well.
In this project, I used the “Scan Documents” feature on the iPhone Notes app to isolate evidence of “work” (paint marks, scratches, debris) from the surface of cutting mats.
The Discovery Process
The project just started with wondering if I could use the scanning feature for something other than documents. The in-class activity where we took portable scanners inspired me mainly because it was so fun to do! I also liked the level of focus it gave to the subject you were scanning. However, the portable scanners were limited because of their size and uniformity. This is why I turned to my Notes app scanner, which I knew had the same purpose.
I began testing with what happened to be in front of me- a cutting mat- and was surprised by the result:
The paint marks and scruffs are not as prominent in person as in the scans. To me, the damage seemed like an overlay on top of the cutting board, which made me test more:
This is the same app, and the same cutting board, but instead, this one was slightly in shadow. And when I say slightly, I mean the only shadow in this image was my own shadow. I was intrigued by how it was able to clearly isolate the scruff marks and paint on top of the board.
I decided to pursue cutting mats as my subject of choice because they are often neglected in the creative process. There is nothing that shows your progress more than the surface you work on, and I wanted to see if I could isolate the evidence of work from the mat itself using the simple Apple Notes app document scanner feature.
The Workflow
The workflow I developed was to place the cutting mat either on the floor or table and use the auto-capture feature to select my mat and take a picture. Sometimes the auto-capture will fail to work and I would have to take a general picture and use the four circles to crop where I want the app to scan:
After taking the picture in even lighting (which I defined by fluorescent overhead lighting), I would move the cutting mat to a shadowed location and take another picture and compare.
The Results
Some Selected Scans:
Some Fun Ones:
Troubleshooting
Things I realized with this project:
The contrast between the floor and the mat matters for the auto-capture to work. The scans look best when it is shot by auto-focused capture as they are less likely to be warped and capture the details better. Example:
Manual ShotAuto-Capture
Diffused lighting is key to getting the best scans without light spots.
The color of the cutting board matters. Black cutting boards offer better contrast and separation between the surface damage and the mat. However, it is more vulnerable to light spots and the details of the cutting mat itself gets lost. This makes it difficult to get a clean image. Example:
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I am satisfied with where my project went. It is very different from what I had been ideating for the past month, but this project sparked my curiosity more, and it was fun running around Purnell and CFA scanning people’s cutting mats and recognizing some of the projects that were worked on them.
However, I struggled to strike the exact balance I was looking for of both the cutting mat and the damage on top being equally visible due to the factors listed above. If I pursue this more in the future, I would like to standardize my lighting in a studio setting. I feel that this will give me more flexibility and control with the different cutting mats. Further, I wondered if there was a process where I could use the Notes App feature but not the native iPhone camera so that I could capture it in an even higher resolution. Finally, I am pretty sure that there are more cutting boards than the ones I’ve scanned. If I were to broaden the scope of this project, I would see if I could befriend an architecture kid and go around their studio taking scans.
The Rest of It (or at least the ones worth seeing)
I want to track my weight throughout the week with the things (objects, people, ideas) that make me happy. I will then use a calorie tracking app (prob myfitnesspal) to track my weight and the caloric equivalent of my “happiness” that day.
The how:
I plan to carry a scale around with me for around a week and weigh myself every time something makes me happy with the thing that makes me happy. Then I will use a calorie tracking app to log my weight and the object of my happiness with the caloric equivalent using the standard measurement of calorie to fat (3,500 calories to 1 pound of fat).
Idea Inspiration and the Why:
This idea came about with a realization I made when scrolling through Tiktok and coming across a video made by a fitness influencer who talked about how they used to track the calories in their toothpaste. I realized that people, through apps like myfitnesspal, make typologies every day by tracking their food, calories, and weight.
Weight is a heavy topic for a lot of people, and growing up in my no-filter Korean family, it is definitely a point of stress for me. In redownloading and analyzing my past MyFitnessPal entries, the daily typologies I made diligently throughout my hs and uni years revealed more than just what I ate that day. It revealed more personal and surprising things.
For example:
the state of my mental health
my financial status
my social life
the evolution of my cooking skills
my culture (& the exposure to new ones)
In making my weight and the “consumed” calories arbitrary, I hope to neutralize the negative connotations around the subject. Additionally, in tracking the more positive aspects of my life- I hope that my typology functions similarly to a gratitude journal.
From Class-
Taking pictures every time I measure my weight. Go pro at the level of the scale.
The human endeavor to capture what we observe and what we cannot observe never ceases to amazing. The endless need to gather data and analyze it, it is something that really struck me as I read the essay. One part that stood out to me when I was reading the essay was a portion where the author writes the two ways photography produces observable things: first is singling out a moment of time where too small to be observable by people and second, second, gathering up light over a number of seconds, minutes, hours or even days and presenting it as one image. It reminded that one of my favorite functions of photography is the capture of time, a concept no one has fully grasped yet but somehow we have very gotten very good at capturing. In this new digital age, it is interesting to think about how now every moment in time is being captured through photography, somewhere in the world.
Panorama: Instead of doing a traditional horizontal movement, I moved in a circle, which reminded me of when we took a portable scanner to a 3D surface.
There was an infrared camera and a piece of tinted glass that I found interesting and fun to play with when we were looking at all the capture devices during class time. I was so entertained to see how a piece of glass that I could not see through was completely transparent the second I held it up to the camera. It was a very interesting concept to investigate theatrically or live. It would be an interesting performance where the live performance could not be seen by the audience unless the specific camera was held up towards the glass to reveal the actions within. When playing with the glass and camera, I thought about how it would be cool to explore the forced contrasting experiences of the live audience and the captured experience. If I put a performer in a box of tinted glass who was constantly performing, knowing when they would be captured and displayed: What would that experience feel like?
In a similar strain of the contrasts between the experiences of the live audience and the captured experience, there was this artist I was introduced to recently who goes by the name Cassils. They’re a visual and performance artist who does some really out-there works, but my favorite of theirs is a performance piece called Becoming an Image. In this work, they essentially pound a giant block of clay in a dark room that is occasionally lit by a flash of a camera periodically. This was performed in front of a live audience. The images are incredible and dynamic, but what I am more interested in is how those images contrast the collectively created images of the live audience, who did not see much. The eye is our first capture tool, and I love how the artist plays with this concept throughout this piece- confronting the truths we capture with our eyes vs. the cameras we have invented.
