[HN Gopher] "Millennium Camera" to take a 1k-year long-exposure ...
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"Millennium Camera" to take a 1k-year long-exposure photo
Author : thunderbong
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-01-12 10:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newatlas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newatlas.com)
| Reubend wrote:
| I think they should have started with a more achievable goal to
| make it to 10 years, and then re-evaluate afterwards. Maybe 100
| is achievable to some extent? 1000 seems like pure fantasy to me.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Or a series of cameras. With one being opened every 10 years or
| so.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I thought the same. I wonder if they did already? If so I would
| love to see the picture(s).
| kibwen wrote:
| It's an art project whose purpose is to get people in the
| present to consider the passage of time, rather than a project
| whose purpose is to produce a photograph. To spark discussions
| like this about its feasibility in the face of the uncertainty
| of the future is as much a part of the project as the camera
| itself.
| mihaic wrote:
| Saying something is art is really not an excuse to not put in
| extra effort. Proof of engineering makes a statement in
| itself.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > To spark discussions like this about its feasibility in the
| face of the uncertainty of the future is as much a part of
| the project as the camera itself.
|
| Nobody's talking about the future of the world as a result of
| this project, they're mostly talking about the future of the
| project itself, and how it'll end up a wet fart because of
| poor planning. If the goal is to get people slapping their
| foreheads then it's a smashing success. Beyond that, I'm not
| sure what the effect will be. All press may be good press,
| but not all press amounts to art.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, it seems purpose built as an untestable thought project.
| Might as well have had some kids put hand prints in concrete at
| the base.
|
| Imagine what the time value of the money spent on this will be
| for this in 1000 years. A market investment of $1000 that could
| return 2% over inflation over that time period would be
| equivalent to $400B in today's dollars.
| CPLX wrote:
| Problem is that'll get you a medium Diet Coke in 3024.
| plasticchris wrote:
| If dollars are even still a thing
| thsksbd wrote:
| Beating inflation by 2% over 1000 years? Physically
| impossible
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I took a photo like that with a ~ 1 year exposure time. The
| patterns the sun makes are really cool, you can make out the
| moments with and without sunshine throughout the days.
|
| My gut feeling of doing this for one year: 1000 years is just
| plain impossible. Not with something made out of metal with an
| actual hole in it. Maybe some glass capped ceramic to avoid
| water ingress and corrosion... but after one year, my camera
| was already full of weird goop.
|
| https://files.rombouts.email/IMG_6500.jpeg
| izzydata wrote:
| How does the sensor work for capturing light for that long?
| Wouldn't it produce a solid white image after a single day? Is
| there any difference between taking a 1000 year exposure and
| taking a photo every day for 1000 years and laying them ontop of
| eachother?
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| It's a pinhole camera, a tiny hole creates a faint projection
| of the scene on the inside of the "camera". You can make one
| yourself with a suitable cardboard box, a bit of foil, a needle
| and a sheet of photographic film. Exposure time ranges from a
| few seconds to a minute or two.
|
| In this case the artist used a layer of paint instead of a more
| traditional photosensitive material. The projected light will
| cause the paint to fade and change over time causing an image
| to appear over the course of centuries instead of minutes.
| jrockway wrote:
| > Is there any difference between taking a 1000 year exposure
| and taking a photo every day for 1000 years and laying them
| ontop of eachother?
|
| There is a difference between taking a photo every day for 1000
| years, what you end up with is, say, a 365,000 second exposure.
| This is an actual 1000 year exposure.
|
| The algorithm where you take 60 1/60th second exposures over
| the course of a second and then stitch them together is
| popular. There are many mobile apps that do this and try to use
| edge detection / "AI" to make them line up, so you can take
| handheld long exposure shots. (Spectre is an iOS app, but I'm
| sure there are others.) You can also do it yourself with a
| tripod and photoshop. The results are good, and it lets you
| take long exposures when you are constrained by having too much
| light and no ND filter / tiny aperture on your lens / etc.
|
| > Wouldn't it produce a solid white image after a single day?
|
| In general, reciprocity holds in photography. A 1 second
| exposure at f/8 is the same as a 2 second exposure at f/16
| given the same sensor. (Films have a technical limitation
| called "reciprocity failure" for long exposures. Silver halide
| requires TWO photons to hit each atom, and the statistics of
| that aren't linear. This means that film exposures depend both
| on the shutter speed and ISO sensitivity; a properly exposed
| long exposure on film will often be longer than what the math
| dictates. The box that your film comes in will often give you a
| number to multiply your calculated exposure by.)
|
| So what they need is exceedingly low ISO film. A picture of a
| sunny scene would generally be exposed at f/16 and 1/<the ISO
| of the film>. A pinhole lens can't open that wide, they're more
| like f/180. That is "7 stops" less light than f/16, so would
| need a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds to capture the same image.
| Now you can see how insensitive the "film" in this camera is;
| it needs 31,536,000,000 seconds of exposure. That means it's
| 3.17e-11 ISO film they have in there. What quantum effects
| happen to film that insensitive, I don't know. They say it's
| paint fading, and I don't know what the rate is. It might end
| up being overexposed. (Film is usually OK being severely
| overexposed, the opposite of digital. No idea if paint fading
| behaves the same way as silver halide. Probably!)
|
| One other thing to think about; films often have differing
| sensitivity to different colors of light. Early film was overly
| sensitive to UV light, because it contains so much more energy
| than red light. Modern black and white film is pretty linear
| over the colors of light, so you end up with a picture that
| looks right to your eye. Paint does not have this carefully-
| designed chemistry, and is probably only sensitive to UV light,
| so that reduces the effective ISO of this camera setup even
| further. It won't respond to light you can see, only UV light.
| But, that works well enough to yield a recognizable image. (The
| problem in photography is that the sky contains too much UV,
| and you end up with an ugly white contrast-less sky. In this
| case, I don't think they care.)
| thsksbd wrote:
| But reciprocity breaks down eventually, and it's not obvious
| to me that the paint will fade at all.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think there's a pretty significant amount of UV coming in
| even through a pinhole. There are indoor-only things that
| are damaged by UV (old computer cases) even though windows
| block a lot of the UV.
|
| I think what's hard to balance is what effects other things
| will have. Humidity will get into the camera and the water
| will attack the paint. Air will be oxidizing the pigments.
| Bugs can probably get in and eat the paint. 1000 years is a
| long time! You have to hope that other effects don't
| destroy the image more quickly than it can be created.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Imagine something which slowly fades with light, like paint.
|
| Taking a photo every day is work, stuff can break. A passive
| sensor like paint would just sit there.
| izzydata wrote:
| But how can they be so sure the paint won't fade completely
| after 1000 years? It could be gone after 10 years. Perhaps
| you could check on it as long as you don't move it even a
| millimeter.
| ruined wrote:
| the chemistry of photography is well-researched and
| involves simple calculations. it comes in many flavors, the
| product is repeatable and testable, and can be made very
| stable.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| We have 1000 years old buildings around. You can study
| parts which were in the sun versus shadow.
| master_crab wrote:
| That steel pole definitely looks like it will last 1000 years. /s
|
| As another posted stated, they should have started small: 1 yr,
| 10yrs, then maybe a 1000. Iterating each time with a better
| design.
|
| Also, dump the steel. You need something more inert.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's art. Doesn't really need to work. But yeah I would be more
| impressive art if it at least appeared like it could work.
| nuccy wrote:
| Art may be useful (or at least usable and realistic), e.g.
| imagine providing instructions how to get the photo from that
| camera for (hopefully) people in 1000 years, or even describe
| what that cilinder on a pole is in the first place.
|
| Science experiments demonstrating discoveries of the past
| centuries (magnetism, electricity, radio) are a kind long-
| term useful art.
| thsksbd wrote:
| Steel can work. Just not that steel.
| jrockway wrote:
| I would have expected a hole drilled into a cave or something
| like that. A piece of steel attached to a deck probably won't
| survive 100 years, simply because someone will want to make the
| deck bigger or better in the intervening time and then the camera
| will move.
|
| That said, that whole pitch drop experiment is going pretty well.
| It's not quite at 100 years, but it's getting very close. (2027).
| So that's 1/10th of a millenium. (I will note that the pitch drop
| experiment has been moved before. It's not nearly as sensitive to
| movement as a camera.)
| Jerry2 wrote:
| What it some bug lays a nest there? Or some dust flies into it?
| There's so many ways to disable this even without discussing the
| types of materials used.
| CPLX wrote:
| > an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona
|
| Clearly I am in the wrong line of work.
| neom wrote:
| Jonathon Keats work -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathon_Keats
| HPsquared wrote:
| How does this fit into data protection law? If a person stands in
| front of it for a moment, (a tiny shadow of) their likeness will
| be preserved in the image. What if that want that removed?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You have a programmers view about how the law works. Such a
| claim would be dismissed immediately as frivolous.
| barelyauser wrote:
| Depends. Can you provide your date of exposure and a equivalent
| exposure of yourself against a neutral background so we can
| average you out?
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I wonder if the paint used as exposed layer will see its
| "printability" property decay with tile. I have experimented
| pinhole exposures length up to 1 day with and photographic films
| and the light capture decay drastically with time: what's
| happening in the beginning of your scene is much more present
| than what was present in the end.
| dstroot wrote:
| A 1k year-long exposure will result in ... a gray blob with no
| useful information. Now a 1k-year timelapse of one photo per day
| made into a film would be amazing!
| jp57 wrote:
| If the probability of the camera being damaged, destroyed,
| vandalized, or stolen in any given day is one in a million, then
| this thing only has a 70% chance of surviving a thousand years.
| (And I think that's high...)
| PBondurant wrote:
| The photographer Michael Weseley did a number of long exposures
| (>12mths iirc) of Berlin during the 1990s as it was being
| transformed after the fall of the Wall and subsequent
| reunification. Viewed as huge prints in a gallery they were
| impressively detailed, as layers of various rebuilding and urban
| planning projects were revealed in varying degrees of
| transparency, depending on how long they took and how recent they
| were:
|
| eg https://www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/14374185
| tropdrop wrote:
| Beautiful work and great magazine. Thanks for sharing
| deadbabe wrote:
| It would have been better to attach the camera to some ancient
| historic landmark that has been around for hundreds of years or
| even thousands of years and will likely still be preserved to be
| around for a thousand more years. Several exist.
| gumby wrote:
| I can't wait to see how the picture comes out!
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