Ocean Floor
Min Hermon
Senior, Stamps School of Art & Design
Medium
Photograph
Abstract
Ocean Floor is a photograph of the Suns’ trajectory throughout a week, taken outside the University of Michigan’s Music School. It uses a simple pinhole camera and alterations made to the negative in Photoshop to create an exaggerated image of a nighttime scene, heavily inspired by the Ocean.
Ocean Floor is a photograph of the University of Michigan North Campus which transforms an evening landscape into an ethereal world. It is a long exposure photograph taken on a pinhole camera, which is a piece of photo paper inserted into a hollowed soda can with a hole punched into the side, then being taped to the side of the Music Building. Usually, to capture the full arc of the Sun, solargraphs are left facing south or north, but I made an error in direction, and the camera was facing East. It was left there for a week before being retrieved, with the photo paper being removed and scanned within a darkroom. The scan of the film negative is then uploaded to photoshop, where it is altered to the state you see it in now. Of course, it isn’t the most accurate in relation to the real world. Some creative liberties were taken, with large amounts of blue, but it was done out of an admiration for the natural world, and specifically, the photo’s resemblance to the ocean floor. Solargraphy is a form of photograph which can vary from being impressionistic to realistic, and it’s quite a simple form of photography as well.