True travel photography

April 24, 2006 9:51 AM

Cameratruck.What do you get when you cross a pinhole camera with a truck? You get the world's largest mobile camera, and perhaps the only camera that is its own darkroom (at least on wheels!). The cameratruck is currently travelling Spain in a trip that will culminate in an exhibit at PHotoEspaña.
posted by Robot Johnny (15 comments total)

Are the tour log photos supposed to have been taken by the truck or not? If so, there are a couple suspicious photos:

This one looks like it was taken thru the windshield of the truck.

This one looks like it had to have been taken at a downward angle, pretty hard assuming the pinhole is in the side of the box section of the truck.
posted by splatta at 10:02 AM on April 24, 2006

Leonardo de Vinci beat these guys to the idea, as I once read where the background scene of the Mona Lisa was actually a painted pinhole image. He was said to have mounted a pinhole camera on a wagon.

I built several crawl-in pinhole cameras with my photography students in the 20 years I taught photography. Sometimes we did develop the black and white images inside the camera. It was actually easier to put the negative in a box and develop in the comfort of the darkroom.

We also made a wet print from the paper negative. Wet, we found, the negative seals to the fresh photographic paper and a clear image is made when light was pass through. Wet images were shaper than the negative held under glass, especially with larger images.

The notable difference in these Spanish images is the color and the ability to capture movement. Our pinhole images required several seconds’ exposure on standard photographic paper.

I’m assuming they are using an extremely fast film/paper. The clarity of the images suggests a lens, in fact, and then it would no longer be a pinhole camera.

Fun stuff nonetheless.
posted by BillyElmore at 10:38 AM on April 24, 2006

I've fantasized about having a huge lens and a huge bellows attached to the back of a truck, which be the inside of the camera. Then I could make the 5' x 5' negatives for the contact prints of my desires.

But I'm probably overcompensating for something.
posted by illovich at 10:43 AM on April 24, 2006

Intriguing idea, but the truck's pix thus far are not very mooving (not to mention that they must have one heck of a tripod.) The gallery images—if they are indeed actual results—look pretty ordinary and don't have the sweeping wide-angle views typically seen in other pinhole landscapes.
posted by cenoxo at 10:56 AM on April 24, 2006

When I lived in NYC, I knew a guy who lived in an old building on the East River in Brooklyn. He turned his bedroom into a pinhole camera by covering the window with black garbage bags and then poking the hole. This resulted in an image of the downtown Manhattan skyline being projected on the opposite wall (upside-down).
posted by winston at 11:05 AM on April 24, 2006

The examples you're giving aren't from the cameratruck... See here.
posted by Robot Johnny at 11:29 AM on April 24, 2006

Does anyone remember the episode of Bloodhound Gang where they were hiding (or trapped?) in the truck - and used a small hole to project an image to figure out where they were going?
posted by wfrgms at 11:29 AM on April 24, 2006

is there any place, yet, to see the images the truck captures? I mean, there's that one sample image linked above and a negative being held up by the photographer, but I can't find any more.
posted by shmegegge at 11:47 AM on April 24, 2006

Hey, there's a NSFW image on that site, it's right here (nsfw)
posted by delmoi at 12:00 PM on April 24, 2006

Leonardo de Vinci beat these guys to the idea, as I once read where the background scene of the Mona Lisa was actually a painted pinhole image. He was said to have mounted a pinhole camera on a wagon.

Um, okay. I once read that the WTC was destroyed by pre-placed explosives.

Also, it would have been cool if someone had tried something like this had been done in the past, at any point in recorded history, really.
posted by delmoi at 12:05 PM on April 24, 2006

Reminds me of the Camera Van
posted by wheelieman at 12:39 PM on April 24, 2006

What do you get when you cross a pinhole camera with a truck?

A PHuck?

Yeah, wfrgms. I remember that episode. They were kidnapped and used the pinhole to see where they were headed. If I remember correctly, it was near an airport.
posted by pmbuko at 12:41 PM on April 24, 2006

The examples you're giving aren't from the cameratruck... See here.

I'm not sure that a blurry, overexposed, sloppily printed, black & white tank car is an improvement. At least the poor dead cow is sharper, in color, and more expressive.

If it's bad photography, print it big and hope that sheer scale is enough to impress?
posted by cenoxo at 1:36 PM on April 24, 2006

delmoi, several Google links talk about Leonardo's use of the Camera Obscura. This one simply states that he used it to study perspective.

It's been about 12 years since I taught photography, and I don't recall my source for the wagon-mounted pinhole/Mona Lisa connection, but this was likely something I read in an old photo history book.

Perhaps all records were destroyed by per-placed explosives in the World Trade Center.
posted by BillyElmore at 2:07 PM on April 24, 2006

wfrgms, yep.
posted by blueberry at 2:39 AM on April 25, 2006