Giant Pinhole Camera Is Three Stories High

The Great Picture team turns an aircraft hangar into a giant pinhole camera

This is the world’s largest camera. You won’t be using it to take holidays snaps or to send pictures of your dinner up to Instagram, and you won’t be able to carry the resulting photograph in your wallet. In fact the massive photo — of a dull scene of a scrubby Californian land — is rather unimpressive save for its size. What this giant camera is about is numbers. Big, big numbers.

The Great Picture was carried out back in 2006 as part of the ongoing Legacy Project, and turned an airplane hangar in Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, California into a pinhole camera. The camera measured 13.71 x 48.76 x 24.38 meters (45 x 160 x 80 feet) and produced a photograph of 9.62 x 33.83 meters (31.6 x 111 feet). And that’s just getting started.

How do you turn a drafty, cavernous hangar into a light-tight box? With lots of hands. Six artists used 24,000 square feet of black plastic sheeting, 1,300 gallons of foam gap filler and 1.52 miles of black tape to seal out the light, and spray 40 cans of black paint around to cut out reflections.

The “film” was a giant sheet of muslin hand-painted with 80 liters of Rockland Liquid Light emulsion. This was done under safelights (the film was black and white).

Finally, a quarter-inch pinhole was punched into the wall, 15 feet from the floor, and the film was exposed for 35 minutes.

This is the result of two months of hard work

Then the development began. A swimming pool sized developing tray was filled with 600 gallons of developer, and the the image was fixed with 1,200 gallons of fixer. Rinsing, the final stage before drying the print, was done with fire hoses hooked up to a pair of hydrants sending through 750 gallons a minute.

It’s an amazing feat, although its a shame that the photo had to be of a nearby control tower and runways. Still, I guess getting a cute dog on a skateboard to stand still for half an hour is even harder than building a three-story camera.

The Great Picture product page [Legacy Project via Petapixel]

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