Above image was made last week, but the road that led to its creation started over five years ago. So, dear reader, do come along for this storytelling ride, as I try to reflect upon that path.
The Sun. How glorious it is. It has inspired countless artists, and yours truly is no exception. Heliography was the first name for photography, and it’s with that in mind that I started directly imaging the sun via daguerreotype method. I began my experiments during the pandemic of 2020. Amid social distancing of late winter and spring of 2021, I yearned for tranquility of nature, and often found myself in local parks with a camera pointed up, toward the sun. I welcomed its rays, letting them bathe the plate for hours, tracing the path of our nearest star as it went from tree to tree, or skimmed behind a singular arboreal specimen, bearing life-giving chi.
During these prolonged exposures, I had plenty of time for contemplation. I wondered what energies the sun was exchanging with the trees, what messages it was bringing them, what messages might it be carrying between them. I imagined those messages to have been positive and reaffirming ones. Then one day an image inspired me, and sparked a thought, an idea, a vision. I wanted to turn the sun into a method of communication, and it occurred to me that this can be done by breaking up my long exposures into morse code. Figuring out the timing wasn’t too hard there, and it was a real treat to see the final plates reflect back at me the joy I felt while making those exposures.
Upon completion of a short series of these solar affirmations, I waited for the next time inspiration strikes. This inspiration came in form of the 2024 a total solar eclipse, which passed over the continental United States. I’ve always wanted to experience totality, but seeing it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be the first person in modern era to capture totality in daguerreotype format. A more detailed story of how this came to be can be glimpsed here, but I did succeed, and so below is once again my daguerreotype of a total solar eclipse during totality, done with no special camera setup and with no crew or sponsorship. Not only were two daguerreotypes of the 2024 totality secured that April 8th, but I pushed it one step further and, to my knowledge, became the first person in history to capture both daguerreotype and wet collodion images of the same totality, which truly made me very happy to have dared to do so.
After getting a better result with capturing the sun’s corona than I could have hoped for, I turned my attention back to Morse code messages for a bit. I was always interested in getting more detail in the scene itself, which is not trivial when shooting directly into the sun for hours. I kept pushing for longer and longer exposures, eventually coming up with this image of the Spreckels Pavilion organ, the sun there spelling “here comes the sun” and exposure taking just about 7 hours. I can’t recall how many tries this took, but I did get to listen to a lot of wonderful performances, and eventually achieved the results I was after as far as my quest for an acceptable tonal scale within the scene.
I still felt like I wasn’t done with solar work. Spurred on by a creative collaboration with a wonderful South American daguerreotype artist, I started work once again. This time I wanted to combine a few of my personal innovations within the world of daguerreotype. In my PREVIOUS BLOG POST I describe how I made the image below, in which the code reads simply ‘SUN’. I chose pure silver art coins to place my images upon; their roundness pleased me greatly, as it seemed befitting while working with Solar images.
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| Capture the Sun, Daguerreotype with Solar Morse Code |
This daguerreotype merges my solar work with a positive/negative phenomenon achieved by partial erasure of initial image and subsequent exposure over that ghost. I’ve been exploring this for a bit previously without much announcement, but, last fall, I did mention it to a few venerated makers of daguerreotypes, so I thought it was time to push it a bit further.
For my next coin I chose a design of a coin that reads ‘FREEDOM’. I’ve often pondered the concept of freedom and what it meant to me as well as others. Within Taoist philosophy, which speaks strongly to me, freedom can mean being unbound by desire. One of the ways to rid yourself of this pernicious feeling is to recognize the value of taking no action whenever action is not obviously needed. Taking no action is a conscious choice, and is often times wiser than expanding effort with uncertain outcome. Observing from the point of stillness the wheel of life as it revolves around us is a skill I yearn to foster within me, and so upon this coin I chose to spell Wu Wei, Chinese for non-ado. Ironically it took a lot of work to create this, but images must materialized once conceived, so it could not have been left undone.
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| Wu Wei - Non Ado - Daguerreotype view 1 |
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There’s a lot of peculiarly beautiful effects that materialize while working with this, including rather pronounced outlines akin to those seen in Sabattier effect. A most intriguing phenomenon occurs when once works with the ghost of the previous image in just the right way; when the plate viewed under traditional lighting configuration the ghost appears as negative, but when the angle of viewing is very acute to the light source a clear and bright positive image reveals itself while all else goes negative as always. Certainly here’s a lot more to try there, and I do plan to carry out more work in this direction, but something else came to me, fully consuming my imagination over the course of the last two months….
The roundness of the coins I was polishing became more and more intriguing to me. Over and over again I polished and fumed my tiny message disks, and something was percolating in my mind, barely distinguishable echoes of an idea was were gently driving me forth. I wanted to say more, but then again was it my place to speak? I meditated upon the opening lines of passage 56 of Tao The Ching – those who know do not talk, those who talk do not know. It seemed to me that these days that’s been truer than ever, and so I wanted to try and somehow spell that with my beloved solar Morse code method. While on the previous coin I did manage to get the two lines of code to be fairly parallel, that part was actually more difficult than someone who hasn’t tried this would likely imagine. Having that experience behind me I was not about to try and make several long lines that would be required to spell what I wanted. In times of quiet artful meditation, which are my favorite times, I pondered how I could accomplish this. One day this August, I was looking at a vinyl Quadrophenia record by The Who, a record I bought simply for its cover art, as I’ve never owned a record player. Suddenly it dawned on me that I can use the same principle to record way longer solar Morse code messages on my daguerreotypes if only I wrote them in a spiral! I sat there flabbergasted at the possibility while simultaneously overwhelmed by how much work it would be to see this idea come to fruition. Over the next couple of weeks I sketched and calculated, then sketched and calculated again. When an object moves in a fairly straight line and at constant speed, such as the sun in the sky, it’s not too difficult to figure out its rate of travel. Things get a lot more complex though if we wish to make that straight-traveling object go in a spiral. The vision was clear though, all that was left was to make it happen.
My work had to be two-pronged: figuring out the timing of my exposures and building the camera back that would rotate my daguerreotype during exposure.
I last had paid attention to calculus in college, completing the third semester in 1996. Imagine my surprise when I had to remember the basics of that discipline in order to figure out the rate of increase in speed of travel of the sun along a rotating spiral path. I’m glad I had a friend who sat me down and helped to make this process a bit more understandable, though it still took me a good number of days to complete all the calculations. Finally I arrived at the following timing sequence of 144 exposures over the span of 24 minutes.
Alongside with figuring out timing I worked with a local fella who is good with a 3D printer on a design for a camera back unlike no other ever created. It’ nothing too complex to be honest, just an original idea that happened to have landed within reach of my imagination. If one considers the suns rate of travel across the sky, maximum motor speed becomes apparent. We must next devise a lightproof back that fits our existing view camera, and connect the motor to a plate holder within it via a rod or other means. Other than making sure our focal plane is right there’s not much more to it. It astonished me to think that nothing like this has ever been done. The only remotely similar mechanism like this is one used in de-rotator cameras in astro-photography, which are built into major telescopes in a few existing observatories. There the photographic medium is rotated in opposite direction to that of Earth, at the speed exactly matching that of the Earth. Super cool indeed, but rather different from what I was thinking.
First prototype of the photographic rotating medium camera back was just to see how things will fit. Second one worked rather well, but my 3D printing friend did suggest a few improvements, which we incorporated in the third iteration. I’m glad that he was already working on that third design while I was testing out version two. There was a heat wave in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, with temperatures reaching 107°F in the shade by my studio. There was no way I could contain my excitement though, and I decided to make an hour-long exposure in order to capture the first spiral image of the sun to exist. Needless to say the camera must be in direct sun when shooting, and placing a white mask over it with just a hole for the lens didn’t help much. There was so much heat radiating from the pavement and walls that the plastic softened and my gears pushed themselves apart, stopping rotation mid-exposure. I was rather distraught upon this discovery, but acted swiftly. I brought the back into the sun again, warming it up to the point where it became soft again, and bent it back to where gears were once again in correct contact. After that I made the following two exposures. First a single spiral as proof of concept, an image was erased, as I don’t have an infinite amount of silver to play with, sadly so. The next logical step was to try multiple exposures, and that’s how the second image came about, which I liked enough to keep. Version two didn’t have bushings in it, and the drive shaft was not moving super smoothly, thus you see brighter spots where rotation slowed down by just a bit. I think I like that imperfection, it feels more organic that way, as if the path of the sun has a heartbeat pattern to it.
After that came time to give my original Morse code goal a try. I was once again grateful for the help of my friends, who sat with me through many failed attempts helping me keep exposures at their precise designated times. Of course, this whole procedure could be made a lot simpler and more exact with the use of a computer-triggered shutter system like a solenoid, but I didn’t have neither enough time not resources to start building yet another component with thus system, besides it really was fun to act as a shutter with 288 combined on and off motions. Contained inside the spiral solar Morse code message is another self-portrait ghost, that must be viewed in a very specific angle to light in order to see that image as a positive. Since most every person who sees these images tends to ask what the code reads, I decided to include a mat with an engraved translation.
Lastly, just about ten days ago, it occurred to me that spirals don’t have to originate in the center, and by offsetting rotation axis I could get some rather nifty interactions between multiple spirals, and that’s how the image at the top of this entry came to exist.
I haven’t felt this energized in a while, and I will certainly be keeping my faithful readers up to date when something is ready to show. In the meantime it’s probably worth mentioning that less than 48hours ago I did file a provisional patent application for a mechanist described and shown above, including of course a provision that it can be made with either direct or geared motor drives. There are a ton of fun possible with this device other than making spirals from the sun via daguerreotype, I hope to get to that fun at some point. For now I’m just happy to find myself in uncharted territory once again, after all, it’s the uncharted territories of the art forest that haver the tastiest berries ready for picking.
Carry on my friends, carry on and keep it creative!
Anton
