Random piece of trivia alert: Today is World Pinhole Day. It falls just a couple of days after Earth Day, so now’s the perfect time to check out David Janesko and Adam Donnelly‘s very cool project that celebrates both pinhole photography and mother earth. The pair goes out into the woods, armed only with some 4X5 film, and uses whatever they can find in nature to build site-specifc pinhole cameras than they then use to photograph the landscape. “We have made about 28 cameras,” Janesko tells The Creators Project. “The ‘body’ and the ‘lens’ are build out of the materials in the landscape that we are photographing. The structures function like a pinhole camera. If we are working in the forest, for example, we build the camera out of leaves, wood, dirt, and anything else we can find. The lens is always something with a preexisting aperture, like a leaf with a hole that was cut out by an insect or just some bark off a dead tree that has a small crack.”
An image captured with one of Janesko and Donnelly’s pinhole cameras
The project is deeply environment friendly—their work barely disrupts the landscape and hardly alters the natural tools they construct the cameras from. “The structure of the camera is large, it has to be big enough for one of us to fit into,” Janesko continues. “The person inside the camera holds the film or photographic paper and the other sits outside and acts as the shutter. We build and photograph with the camera in a single day, we leave the camera as we made it, to fall apart and disappear back into the environment.”
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A camera the pair constructed
Janesko and Donnelly will continue making their wild pinhole cameras, and are embarking on a two-week trip to photograph the Rio Grande. The pair is also working and a book and a documentary about their work. “For both of us there is something inexpressible about being in the camera, laying in the dirt, remaining totally still, in total darkness while the film or paper is exposing sometimes,” says Janesko. “We are in there for 45 minutes there is a sensory deprivation that happens. All you can feel is the ground, your inevitable uncomfortable position and the muffled sounds coming from outside. There is a world in there. We try to capture that experience in the photos.”
Watch Janesko and Donnelly at work below.
Janesko and Donelly are crowdsourcing funding for their documentary. To donate, click here.
Related:
DIY: 3 Tips For Photographing The Milky Way
Make Your Own Camera Obscura [Instructables How-To]
