Tim Hughes

Tim Hughes
Gasworks Park, Seattle, WA

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

The camera is a 140-degree panning camera that I made for my former photography professor, Kate Leonard, this past summer. It features a motorized arm that turns it from side to side, a removable top that seals out light with no need for tape, a tripod mount on the bottom, and a magnetic “lens” cap. Back in April of last year, Kate approached me about making her a camera. Pinhole photography was very much my thing during her photography class, and she said she was interested in commissioning me to build her a camera. During her class I had experimented with pinhole panoramas by taking six photos, each one turned 60-degrees relative to the previous photo. This created a pseudo panorama when lined up, which was interesting, but I wanted something better. My goal in making this camera was to make a camera that could capture a perfect 180-degree panorama by having the pinhole itself rotate relative to the paper behind it. The hardest part in making the camera was accurately centering the pinhole so that the pinhole would rotate on axis and not produce a blurry image (not having access to a machine shop, the pinhole is not perfectly centered, which is why the image is not super sharp). I also fell short of my 180-degree goal, but if I adjusted how much cloth I used around the rotating portion, and adjusted the length of the arm, I would be able to achieve close to 180-degrees. One quirk that I did not expect is the peanut shape of the photo, which you can see in Gasworks2. This is because of the way the arm rotates the pinhole – it rotates slower at the edges (increasing exposure time) and faster through the middle (decreasing exposure time). This particular photo, Gasworks2, was a five minute exposure on a very bright day.