Far
Side:
Taking
Nature Photography Into New Realms
By Bjørn Rørslett
This page is devoted to the truly far-out approaches in nature photography. Here, all orphaned approaches such as pinhole photography, afocal methods, multi-band imaging, strip-film and moving-target photography, just to name a few techniques, will be brought together in a mutual home. They convey information about Nature that is easily lost in the traditional branches of Photography. You are encouraged to delve into the inner circle of Nature, the way Nature expresses herself. We can listen to the murmur of the ocean and enjoy the trains of moving patterns across the ocean floor - or try to capture its essence by making the waves themselves the optics to record an image. Every fluctuation, every departure from the steady state of Nature, will yield an imaginary photograph which is yours to capture. By using the well-proven capability of the photographic medium as a means of integrating time and space, Nature's expressions can be turned into wonderful images we may relate to, showing patterns that largely are unperceived by our narrow-minded senses.
These peripheral aspects of Photography appeal a great deal to me and are but a logical extension of my commitment into Ultraviolet (UV) and Infrared (IR) photography. In those areas, we use traditional photography and invisible bands of radiation to record images that we might perceive, were our eyes sensitive to energy outside the visible 400-700 nm band. So these approaches basically remain traditional photography, using lenses to focus a positive image onto film.
Pinhole photography has been know for a very long time although it has fallen into oblivion over and over again. This is a case of lensless photography. The pinhole lacks all usual properties of a lens-based system: there is no finite focal length, no plane of focus and therefore, the depth of field is virtually infinite. Although the pinhole all by itself cannot be assigned a focal length, it isn't truly afocal, because the distance from the pinhole stop to the recording medium will in the traditional sense be its "focal length". Accordingly, we can for any pinhole setup compute the actual f-number, whenever the size of the pinhole aperture and the distance to the image plane are known.
Afocal photography, another lensless approach, doesn't use an aperture at all and the imaging rays are recorded directly onto the medium. If all rays striking the medium are randomly orientated there will be no perceptible density variation in the image and no meaningful photograph can result. On the other hand, if the rays are not random at least within a sector of space, variations of image density occur to give rise to a photographic image. If all this sound a bit like black magic you may be right - however, it indeed is possible to record images without using either a stop in front of the medium (the pinhole case), or a lens (traditional photography).
Examples of these alternate methods are shown below. More images are to follow. Just click on thumbnails to view an image, which will open in a new browser window. You can adjust window size by dragging the margins if necessary. If the window is covered by others, clicking the thumbnail will bring it forward again. There is no need to close the picture window before another image is opened.
I get a lot of requests on how these images were obtained, so have written up the essentials of Afocal approaches. For the remainder of the methods, no details are published at present. There is however a pointer as to the method applied in each case. The rest is up to you and your imagination ...
