Ditch the DSLR? The 200-year-old science of my new favorite camera (2^14 sub special!)

digital cameras are getting smaller and

smaller

you're watching me right now on this

sony mirrorless that's

you know probably about the size of my

hand which is

pretty respectable but then there's also

this gopro that i film with it's this

tiny little cube

and then my phone camera which is

basically a little speck

hiding behind this aperture at the other

end of the spectrum

we have

this which i just built and this is an

exceedingly

large camera i figured that if my first

foray into analog photography was worth

doing

it was worth overdoing so you feed this

camera

entire sheets of sensitized paper and

11 by 15 posters exit the camera

ready to hang on the wall there are a

few quirks about this camera that i'm

going to get into

in a few minutes notably a painfully

painfully low

effective iso a significant spherical

aberration

and focusing problems and also a wee bit

of a tendency to light itself on fire

but all of that aside i have had great

fun with this project and i expect to

take

a great many more pictures using this

camera

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the first step in making a camera is

creating a light sensitive element

modern cameras use electronic pixels

that create an electronic signal

proportional to the amount of light

shining on them

but old cameras analog cameras use

light sensitive chemical reactions the

process i'm going to be showing you

today

isn't actually really a photographic

technique but a print making technique

it was never really intended to be used

in a camera like this just to make

photographic prints from film negatives

it's called the cyanotype or blueprint

process and it was originally created by

sir john herschel in 1842 as a method

for reproducing drawings

like oh yeah i want to make this book

about astronomy but i need a way to

you know recreate pictures rapidly why

don't i invent an entirely new

photographic chemistry just so that i

can do that

scientists back then were a different

breed his recipe was

basically untouched until very recently

all of the old like

blueprints architectural drawings that

you've seen used herschel's original

recipe

today i'm going to be using a slightly

modernized version that exposes a little

faster

from mike ware today we are making

a cyanotype camera first step in making

that

is mixing cyanotype solution

which contains cyanide

counter-intuitively

the cyanide isn't actually the toxic

part

because despite grinding the potassium

ferric cyanide into a fine inhalable

powder

the cyanide ion is trapped inside the

fairy cyanide ion and then

bonded to a metal it's not the hydrogen

cyanide that you know spies keep in

their teeth or

the doctor gave to dr air away before

the voyage in contact

no the the most worrying thing about

this is that there's like

sort of a yellow stain which i believe

is the ammonium dichromate leaking out

which is just lovely

that and the fact that they use degrees

fahrenheit in the recipe

just fill me with confidence the most

toxic thing in this recipe is actually

the ammonium iron iii oxalate

which starts as these lovely blue green

crystals that

somehow remind me of something when you

mix these three chemicals together

overheat and then let the solution cool

potassium iron iii oxalate precipitates

out

this would yield about 33 milliliters

of fluid and the rest would be discussed

in green sludge

and you can filter it away as these

slightly less

lime green and more forest green

crystals

wow that's really cool that's beautiful

there's your green sludge

it's crystallized out of course me the

material scientist

is always excited about crystals but

once you get rid of them

you're left with a bottle of sort of a

yellow colored liquid

that when exposed to ultraviolet light

turns into a vibrant blue

referring to this as a dark room

is pretty generous it doesn't really

block out very much light

but on the other hand the cyanotype

process isn't really all that

photosensitive

so it might work anyway so i've been

keeping the sensitizer in here is that

on camera yeah

inside of a completely closed box that i

even put a lid over to stop straight

light coming in

so i'm hoping that this is not yet you

know used up

yep still a yellow green color of course

you you can't see that on that camera

but i swear it's a

sort of clearish yellow green then this

is just citric acid

this is now clean so i'm going to get

probably

a pretty good syringe full of this

syringe but i don't know pipette

cool now we need a little bit of

citric acid so mix this up i'm not sure

this is going to come across on camera

at all

because it's white because it's like a

greenish liquid on

white but here i'm using a glass

stirring rod to spread the solution so

that i don't waste any

especially since i only ever coat one

piece of paper at a time

if i was using a brush a lot of

sensitizer would just get stuck in the

brush and would be wasted so

the glass is an interesting workaround

oh that's so infinitely better than when

i tried this a week ago

a little bit of practice goes a long way

if you want to make a blueprint-esque

image using cyanotype paper

you first need to create a mask here i

have a transparency sheet and i'm

writing on it in black sharpie because

ultraviolet light is going to go through

the transparency sheet

but ultraviolet light is not going to go

through the sharpie

this one gets this clipped to it

and there we go

okay so the first time i tried this

about a week ago as a test

it was mind-bogglingly fast the thing

exposed in less than a minute

it's a lot brighter today so i think it

might be even faster

there we go

that's like instantaneous

wow the yellow sensitizer solution is

being transformed by the ultraviolet

light

into a pigment chemical called prussian

blue

because i'm a material science nerd i

have to point out that prussian blue is

a really cool structure

that was just a couple seconds

iron fairy cyanide where the fairy

cyanide ion

made of iron and cyanide looks like this

big 3d cross

and it's stuck together at its ends by

more iron

into this cubic crystal lattice the

crazy thing is that this structure has

iron in it with

two different oxidation states and i

think it's actually electrons jumping

back and forth between these two

different irons that allows the dye

to absorb red orange light at 680

nanometers

which has the result of making it look

very blue

so check this out me take the

transparency off

and the text is unexposed you can see

that part of the pigment reacted to the

light and part of it didn't

it's got the dirty bath on the left

dirty bath at least do it in two steps i

figure

critically this crystallized prussian

blue

is not water soluble but the original

yellow sensitizer solution

is that means that we can wash the

exposed paper in water

to get rid of the excess sensitizer but

the exposed regions remain blue

so we're left with a negative blue white

image of our mask

that worked really well

oh yeah clip it up to dry

if you want more precision say you

wanted to make a design like a youtube

play button that says 2 to the 14

subscribers

you can actually print out an image on a

transparency

expose through that printed mask and

then wash it to get

really great crisp lines of course in

this case an inkjet printer on plastic

causes a lot of smudging so you know

maybe less than perfect lines at this

point you may be yelling at your screen

he's making prints this isn't a camera

the thumbnail had a camera in it

the only difference between making

prints

and actually exposing a photograph is

how you decide

which areas of the paper get more light

and less light

so far i've been using a physical mask

that blocks light from reaching certain

parts of the paper and lets the light

through in other places to turn the

paper blue

but what if instead i used a lens a lens

basically takes all the light coming in

from one direction

and focuses it to a single point then

all the light from a different direction

comes and it's focused at another point

and so on so if you focus a lens against

a flat surface

you can actually make an image where

every spot in that image

is made from light that approaches the

lens from a slightly different direction

and guess what now we have some parts of

a piece of paper that are receiving more

light

than other parts of a piece of paper we

can make a print out of this

so i embarked on constructing a very

large camera

man settlements you could use a brand

new

saw and a piece of mdf that cuts like

butter for a camera you need

first a way to hold the sensitized paper

or film

a lens to create an image on that film

and then a shroud to stop extra light

from reaching the photosensitive paper

all of the light in the camera should

have to pass through the lens and

contribute

to image formation i designed the setup

in cad printed out some parts

and attached everything to a slide arm

that fits on my largest tripod

the paper is clipped to some mdf in the

back that i've painted black to minimize

reflections

and the lens chucks into a 3d printed

jig in the front

there's an additional story here i don't

have time to tell completely where my

really cheap 500 millimeter lens was

actually more like a 550 millimeter lens

and then i forgot that focusing on close

things made the distance even longer

so basically i built everything too

short and i needed to make some

modifications

but in the end it worked the shroud was

by far the most tedious part to

construct and it's basically just a

whole lot of black poster board

that's cut creased and hot glued

together so that it

completely envelops the lens and

paper holder assembly letting no light

pass in

there's a 3d printed sort of sleeve in

the front

that actually allows the hood to slide

down over the lens holder

quite securely it's kind of weird

because you have to look away from the

thing you're photographing to line it up

and the image is all upside down and

backwards because of the way that the

lens focuses it

but the bigger issue is spherical

aberration spherical aberration

is a real pain the tree is in focus

and the house is no longer in focus and

then i tilt back

and the house is in focus and the tree

isn't like it's it's this much of the

image

now most film is tiny so you put your

film here and it would be in super sharp

focus and you'd have no problems

but i wanted to make big prints i wanted

to put a whole sheet of paper in here at

once

i could improve the focus dramatically

by cranking down the aperture using a

smaller diameter lens or just covering

up parts of this lens

but unfortunately that will also make it

take

much longer to expose and as it turns

out

exposure timing is is already a problem

in order to originally calibrate the

exposure time on this camera

i set a piece of paper down in direct

sunlight which i knew would expose in

you know 30 to 60 seconds and

i pointed a camera at that and i used

the camera as basically a light meter to

tell me how bright that piece of paper

was for point of comparison i did the

same thing

inside the camera i put the same piece

of white paper in the camera

and i pointed the camera at the sky and

then i took a picture of the paper in

the camera through the viewfinder

in order to figure out how bright that

paper looked

when it was illuminated by the sky and

unfortunately

it was really really dim so it turns out

that i have made a grave mistake

one exposure on this camera would take

over 16 hours with the brightest thing

in the picture

being the sky i did the math earlier

that is an effective iso

of 0.00046

so as opposed to like an iso of 100 or

an iso of 1600

no we go down by like seven orders of

magnitude

the first picture that i took only

exposed for about two hours and the palm

tree that i was photographing

was moving back and forth in the wind a

lot so while it was a good test

and upon washing i got an image that

image was both

very faint and very blurry the next shot

that i took was a picture of our roof

sun is about to set the sky is not as

bright as it normally is

at least not during the middle of the

day so i'm going to pull the camera

there is some manner of image there here

were a bunch of vents and skylight heads

and stuff like that and i was hoping to

see how much

detail i can capture at least near the

middle the image

in the viewfinder looked extremely sharp

this is my print of the roof of the

house

there's a lot of detail here um which is

very nice

but i was really hoping for for more

crispness than that because i know that

the actual image projected onto the

paper was sharper than that

so i'm trying to figure out what the

issue is i'm pretty sure that when i

pulled this paper off of the well

i guess it would have been upside down i

think that due to humidity or

you know heat or whatever it was

actually buckled out in the middle

like that a little bit so basically the

center was too close to the lens and i

think it just

straight up came out of focus so i want

to be able to press the whole sheet

flat while i'm exposing and to do that

i have a sheet of acrylic but i need to

make sure

that acrylic is going to be transparent

to ultraviolet light

it really doesn't matter how quickly

this exposes i just want to see how it

exposes differently

the part that's under the acrylic versus

the part that's not under the acrylic

so i'm not even going to bother to time

this i just want to see it turn blue

it's not looking good oh nuts

knowing that the cyanotype chemistry is

sensitive to ultraviolet not

visible i decided to run a test and i'm

really glad that i did

well you know once it dries that'll be

about fully exposed

and this is somewhere down there so i

lose about half of my ultraviolet when i

go through that piece of

acrylic instead i just decided to tape

all the way around the perimeter of the

paper it kind of hurts

because i really enjoyed having the

binder clips on it because they leave a

mark

and i really love when you can look at

something and immediately know how that

thing was made

and with tape it's a little less obvious

of course with a day or two of exposure

time per image

my options for taking photographs around

town with this camera

are limited so the third picture that i

took

was drum roll please the front of the

house

there were two added complexities with

this one first

i was worried about the camera being

disturbed by pedestrian which meant that

all day i was sort of leaning out the

window to check on the camera

but second the camera was pointed

generally south

which meant that direct sunlight could

at certain times of the day

hit this lens this is bad news because

if the sun were to actually get focused

to a point by that lens

the paper the actual photographic paper

or the black poster board that the

camera was made of

would get hot and run the risk of

starting a fire

i actually ended up pulling the camera

late in the day because i was paranoid

that the sun was shining into the camera

oh that's getting brighter okay yeah i

need to be done

darn it but that turned out to be a bad

call for the quality of the image

there's a lot of blue coming out man

you can't see much of the house i'm

disappointed

it needed a longer exposure that's

amazing

it needs like two days basically got the

driveway in the sky

the last picture that i took before

making this video was on an

unfortunately windy day but i basically

just

abandoned the camera in a parking garage

on campus

over the weekend pointed northeast into

the mountains

i arrived just after sunrise to set up

the camera

and came back to retrieve it late that

night despite the trees blurring out in

the wind i really love this shot because

you can make out the sky

the mountains the trees and the

foreground all independently

it felt like a very real photograph

despite being kind of blurry

now it's hanging by our front door

opposite the pale blue dot

and the roof texture shot is in the

living room next to bender and 3po

unlike most of my projects where i'm

sort of completely finished with it

before publishing a video

this time i know that i'm going to keep

using this camera because it's a pile of

fun

i really like the images that i'm

getting out of it and the technical

challenge of trying to improve the

process

is just wonderful so if anybody has any

suggestions about things that i should

take pictures of

or things that i could do to make the

camera even better

i would be all ears so leave comments

below

thanks for watching

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so

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you