#platephotography

[lucymckenna]

Plate camera extension for spherical glass objects. Work in progress

[lucymckenna]

These are some pics from the plate photography extravaganza at Armagh Space Observatory back in January this year, during the lead-in to my exhibition. Thanks to the help of Yanina, James, Rok & James Jnr. I was able to bring my specially built plate camera for spherical glass plates, we attached it to the Grubb Telescope and made about 10 exposures of the Moon & Pleiades star cluster. I had coated the glass bulbs with gelatine & liquid light. We did a range of exposures, some 3mins, right up to 20mins. This bunch of astronomers are extraordinary people and their generosity, patience, curiosity, and vast experience + knowledge meant I was able to make these strange glass photographs for the exhibition. It was a really great night of learning for everyone.

[lucymckenna]

Been playing with some ideas over the Christmas for an upcoming exhibition in February 2017. Although lead-in time is short, I'll be hopefully showing some new glass photographs thanks to an extension I'm making to my telescope plate camera. That is pending clear-skies in the next few weeks however. I've also been making some small prototypes for a suspended paper-cut installation based on hypothetical alien plant life. The exhibition will be a selection of works in progress, all connected to my interest in Mars.

[lucymckenna]

I made a trip to Armagh Space Observatory in July to try out the glass plates and my amended wooden dry plate camera with some actual space objects. Conditions were tricky enough as it was partially cloudy, and didn’t get dark until quite late at night so myself and James the technician who was assisting me had to think fast in order to take advantage of any clear sky time. We got a peep at the crescent Moon through the Grubb and I snapped an image using my iphone first, which showed up the beautiful crater detail. We eventually managed to get two 5 minute exposures of my glass plates with the Moon in between clouds, and working in total darkness we safely stored the plates back in their dark boxes. We were lining the camera up with another plate to make an exposure of Mars when the clouds rolled in and ended the photomaking session. Although it was past midnight when we finished with the telescope, I developed the plates in my trays set up in the Observatory kitchen before I left because we just couldn’t wait to see if we had gotten an image, and it was quite amazing to see the Moon appear before our eyes in just about 20 seconds in the developing chemicals. It’s difficult to document, but the glass plates actually do record crater detail and texture of the Moons surface really nicely when viewed on a lightbox. It was a pretty amazing experience to go through this photomaking process in the traditional way it would have been done with that telescope in the 1960′s, and it’s not an easy process. As Conor said, who was also helping out that evening, we could probably be sure we were the only people making glass plate photographs of the Moon that night. A 4.5 billion year old Moon, captured using a 131 year old telescope, on a 60 year old glass plate.