Contraptionography

One of the things I love about the pioneering days of photography and cinema is how people would knock up strange contraptions out of bits and pieces in order to shoot or to get particular effects. For example, when the Lumiere brothers refused to sell Georges Melies one of their cinematographs, Melies simply bought a projector from Robert Paul in London and reversed its mechanisms to make his own movie camera. It looked like crap and sounded like a tractor, but it did the job.

Digital photography would seem to close down these sorts of contraption-building possibilities but it's not the case. Although you can't mess around with a digital camera's inner workings, other innovations are possible. Ttv photography, for example, involves shooting with a digital point-and-shoot through the viewfinder of a second camera such as a Kodak Duaflex.

You can also add strange home-made lenses or filters to a digital point-and-shoot. So yesterday I had a go.

First you need some sophisticated equipment:



My trusty Lumix point-and-shoot; the tube from a kitchen roll (any sort of tubing will do, so long as it's the right size and excludes light); a cheap plastic magnifying glass (or anything to act as a lens or filter - stiff plastic, a bit of coloured/warped glass, whatever you want); masking tape; elastic bands; scissors.

Use the elastic bands and masking tape to attach the tube to the point-and-shoot, and then attach your makeshift lens/filter to the other end of the tube. Now you have a sophisticated high tech widget that looks like this:



You're ready to roll. Below is my first attempt. I know it's rubbish but I'll experiment some more when I get time and hopefully produce something better.



Why bother doing this? The main reason is the unpredictably it brings to digital photography. Instead of taking a nice clean shot and then deliberately manipulating it in Photoshop to achieve a desired effect, you're taking pot luck. The makeshift lens/filter introduces distortions, blurring, strange refractions of light and so on. Some results will be horrible, but others will be beautiful or at least interesting.