Visiting one of my best and oldest friends in Bristol last weekend, who studied film and then became an engineer, married not long ago at a fascinating location… The Clifton Observatory! The Clifton Observatory houses a Camera Obscura, first installed in around 1829 by William West, an oil and watercolour artist. West was fascinated by Optics and engineering, he introduced Bristol to photography, selling his own photogenic paper from the observatory where he lived with his family.

Before Jon and me went into the observatory to see the camera obscura, I took an exposure of it using a pinhole camera made out of a Pepsi max can and some photosensitive paper. I guessed the aperture size was 0.5mm and measured the focal length which was 66mm giving me an F stop of f/132. The paper had an ISO of 3, or so people say, no problems so far though. With this information I was able to delineate the amount of time the exposure would take using a light meter app on my very smart phone.

Here’s the positive made from contact printing the negative using the lowest setting on my trusty Convoy s2+ flashlight.

Clifton Observatory, Clifton Downs. Pinhole photo on Ilford Multigrade pearl paper.

Clifton suspension bridge as seen in the camera obscura.

After this exposure we had some fun operating the camera obscura ourselves in the top of the tower, I really enjoyed the fact we could move the turret which housed a convex lens and sloping adjustable mirror giving us a 360 panoramic view of the surrounding area.

This was installed the year before Brunnel first designed/proposed the suspension bridge so the view has changed a lot over Avon Gorge since West installed it almost 200 years ago.

After seeing the obscura and playing with my pinhole cameras, I decided to make my bedroom into a camera obscura by making it light tight(ish) with some bin liners and masking tape. I then cut a small 10-20mm aperture in that which produced a great image on my wall of the outside world.

But then I thought why not take some long exposures using my very smart phone, very lo-fi. They looked cool but then I was in them, I thought lets make a self portrait, which looked quite ghostly, I then decided to grab my dog and create some weird and wonderful portraiture.

Below are those long exposure taken inside my camera obscura with my very smart phone!

After these were shot I took another self portrait in the studio, but with a pinhole camera with quite a small focal length of 16mm, in an old helix pencil case, I had to cut the photosensitive paper to fit in there. Here’s the positive contact print below…

Self portrait in studio, pinhole photograph contact print. 2026.

I liked how the tape I used to sandwich the negative and the would be positive together exposed as well, reminds me of some of Man Ray’s work, those brilliant photograms/rayographs.

Camera Obscura

Resting