First thoughts
Posted: May 2, 2011 Filed under: Build, Uncategorized | Tags: bicycle, bikes, brief, camera, gazebo, obscura, pinhole, trailer Leave a comment »At the moment I’m busy designing the camera obscura, and I will post photographs and updates to show my progress. I’ve set myself a tough brief, as it needs to be:
- Portable – To fit on the bicycle trailer! Ideally not too heavy either.
- BIG! Ideally it needs to seat a small group
- Dark – It has to be light tight else it simply won’t work!
- Innovative – using second hand materials wherever possible
- Simple – Simple is beautiful after all, and it’s no good if it takes an age to set up and dismantle
- Cheap – Apparantly having limited resources increases creativity.. so we’ll see!
Camera Obscura design basics and my drawings and designs to come soon – it’ll make more sense then. For now, you can look here for some good explanations on designs.
So – that’s quite a brief I’ve set myself. I have been doing some mental sketching, and I’m finding the hardest part of the design is the fact that it needs to be collapsible – bikes and trailers can carry a lot, but the smaller the structure can become the easier it’ll be to transport. Making the whole thing light tight should be fairly straightforward with enough fabric and perseverance (I hope!).
I had some thoughts about using some old tent poles and sowing a template to go over the top – it’d be light, fairly easy to put up, stable with enough guy ropes.
THEN
I went for a picnic up on Dartmoor and I saw one of these :
Don’t they look happy!
I’m now thinking now of using the structure of a secondhand gazebo to provide the structure for my camera. It is simple, portable, a fair size, hopefully cheap (scouring freecycle, eBay and gumtree as we speak!) and I should be able to use the exisiting fabric as a base to extend and black out the walls as well.
Really keen to track one down – if you might be able to help get in touch, I really can’t wait to get building and seeing it’s first images.
