Afghan Box Camera at the Open Doors in Sao Paulo

On December the 12th and the 13th, I had the honour in participate at the first "Open Doors" event held in Sao Paulo at the beautiful Casa Ranzini. The event, which is quite popular in Europe, has started to happen in Brazil only this year and quite a few sites were open to the public view. 

I was invited by my friend, who has a photography lab at this magnificent house, to take my Afghan Box camera and make some portraits from the visitors. He gave pinhole workshops to whoever got interested in play a bit with some photo papers and chemicals.

I had some quite nice results. It was the first time I was using a graduated filter (n2) behind the lens to help getting a better contrast on the negatives. I also used his lab to produce the positives in contact print. I made exposures of 20", 30" and sometimes 40", depending on the negative density.

 

Paraty Photography Festival 2014 - Afghan Box Camera (lambe-lambe) results.

So, these are a few results with my Afghan Box Camera (also known in Brazil as lambe-lambe) from few weeks ago at the "Paraty em Foco", a photography festival that happens every year in the Estate of Rio de Janeiro. We've set up the camera at the central square in the very pictoresque town of Paraty and the results are great, but more than that, we've interacted quite a lot with the passers by that were really interested on how the camera worked. We've had few volunteers!

Afghan Box Camera

I've spent a couple of very busy months on building and testing my Afghan Box Camera, a sort of "instant camera" from the past. The camera is basically a light proof box where, besides working as a camera, it also works as a darkroom. That's because all the  image processing is made inside the camera soon after the shot it's been taken. For this, a tray with a developer and fixer is placed inside so the photographic paper can be processed.

I've followed the brilliant work of Lukas Birk and Sean Foley from the Afghan Box Camera. If you're interested on more about this sort of cameras I highly recommend checking out the site. I've also built a Tumblr page where I've been posting all stuff related to my project: lambemovel.tumblr.com/

And here are some of the test I've made so far...