The Art of Ultra-Long Exposure Photography

Who says that simple can’t be brilliant? The above picture was taken in simplest of ways, over a really long time, with the simplest of machines: a homemade pin-hole camera, illuminating a simple piece of photo paper inside. The exposure: 6 months.

The blue arcs are the paths of the sun as it volleyballed over the horizon day after day between December 19, 2007 and June 21, 2008 (the winter and summer solstices). The breaks in those lines show when the sun was obscured by clouds, creating a sort of visual record of the weather for length of the exposure. The bridge in the image is Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK.

The image was created by pinhole auteur Justin Quinnell using, get this, a soda-can strapped to a telephone pole with a 2.5 mm hole punched into the metal. Left to imbibe the tiny light for months, the resulting image showed the sun’s delicate movement across the sky over that period of time, tracing the subtle movement of the Earth’s rotation around the sun from the winter to summer solstices, starting at the lowest points during winter, rising daily until it reached its apex on June 21st when the project was completed.

For more of Justin’s pinhole photography along with other equally surreal and haunting images, be sure to visit his site.

Even though Quinnell has a milestone with a 6-month exposure, it’s not the longest one around. The following picture was taken by German photographer Michael Wesley as project by the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and taken over a period of a whopping 3 years, during the demolition and ensuing construction of the MoMA’s museum building there.

Here is more of Wesley’s work using the ultra-long exposure technique. The dates/lengths of the exposure and locations can be found under each image.

And finally a haunting image of the photographer’s study, where it appears ghosts walk among us.

And finally another great long-exposure image by …cave

exposure: 15 july 2009 – 21 december 2009

The art form of ultra-long exposure photography is known as Solargraphy. A fairly non-poetic name and certainly not as charming as the images would lead you to believe but it’s certainly effective.

Expert practitioner Ollipekka Kangas says

Basically solarigraphic camera is a pinhole camera, very slow one. These pinhole photographs taken with a lensless pinhole camera with a extra long exposure. I use black&white paper which is 5-10 ASA. Exposure time can be very long, in some photos up to six months. Usually average camera is hidden in city for one to two months. The picture will appear without developing photographic paper with any kind of chemicals. Exposured paper is scanned in darkness and developed in Photoshop. All the cameras are very low tech, cheap boxes, canisters or film cans. This method in is antidote for digital photographic madness. I can take only like 5 pictures in month.

The video below showcases some of the brilliant work of Ollipekka.