I did not particularly enjoy the process of building a camera obscura: I ran into several difficulties early on because many of my supplies for the project were in my locker at school, and I was home during the freeze. I had to improvise with many of my tools and materials but I managed to make it work.
One of my major difficulties was getting my tape to cover all of the boxes’ sides, it kept popping off on one end of the joint between two sheets of cardboard, letting a lot of light into the camera and creating a lack of structural support. To fix this I decided to deviate from the original instructions and use hot glue to hold the 2 boxes’ sides together because it was much sturdier than my tape. I also deviated from the instructions in regards to the tracing paper: all we had in the house at the time was wax paper, which still works as a screen, being translucent.
Fortunately for me, working with the camera was far easier than building it. The only difficulty I really ran into was getting just the right amount of light when taking my pictures: too little exposure wouldn’t allow many details to appear and too much light would create an undesirable white spot in the center of the image, where the magnifying glass concentrated the light. In addition to this, the camera did not take clear photos of up close subjects, so I mainly photographed things at least 20 feet away. I may have been able to adjust the boxes inside of each other to fix this: but it didn’t occur to me at the time that it was an option.
All in all I was not overly fond of working with the camera obscura: I see it as a strange filter to put over a real camera (on my phone: the device that actually captured the images). That being said I do like some of the effects I was able to see in my photos: the camera obscura distorted light in a way that was very interesting to me, creating circular reflections that have an almost magical, celestial quality, which can inform my style in future art pieces, so I consider the experience to have been more or less valuable in the end.
-Alana Radkevich (2-9-2023)