Around 1969, I remember experimenting with off camera flash and torches in the landscape. I would photograph trees, grass etc. in the pitch black of night. The results were interesting but never resolved and the negatives were later lost.

At some point I always meant to get back to the technique.

On the way to the Murray Darling Palimpsest Conference at Mildura in 2006 we camped over night at Lake Hattah. The lake had recently been filled and along the lake shore were thousands of treed knee deep in water - each one had its own character and I began experimenting with off camera flash so as the illumination from the flash lit up the water in the foreground and the tree, but fell off behind the tree and left a black background.

Early Observations and Experiments

The basic optical principles of the pinhole are commented on in Chinese texts from the fifth century BC. Chinese writers had discovered by experiments that light travels in straight lines. The philosopher Mo Ti (later Mo Tsu) was the first – to our knowledge – to record the formation of an inverted image with a pinhole or screen. Mo Ti was aware that objects reflect light in all directions, and that rays from the top of an object, when passing through a hole, will produce the lower part of an image (Hammond 1981:1). According to Hammond, there is no further reference to the camera obscura in Chinese texts until the ninth century AD, when Tuan Chheng Shih refers to an image in a pagoda. Shen Kua later corrected his explanation of the image. Yu Chao-Lung in the tenth century used model pagodas to make pinhole images on a screen. However, no geometric theory on image formation resulted from these experiments and observations (Hammond 1981:2).

In the western hemisphere Aristotle (fourth century BC) comments on pinhole image formation in his work Problems. In Book XV, 6, he asks: "Why is it that when the sun passes through quadri-laterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular? [...]" In Book XV, 11, he asks further: "Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same reason as that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone? [...]" (Aristotle 1936:333,341). Aristotle found no satisfactory explanation to his observation; the problem remained unresolved until the 16th century (Hammond 1981:5).

The Arabian physicist and mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, experimented with image formation in the tenth century AD. He arranged three candles in a row and put a screen with a small hole between the candles and the wall. He noted that images were formed only by means of small holes and that the candle to the right made an image to the left on the wall. From his observations he deduced the linearity of light. (Hammond 1981:5).

In the following centuries the pinhole technique was used by optical scientists in various experiments to study sunlight projected from a small aperture.

I was attracted to this image of Aristotle with this hand through the aperture of the window - titled the fall of Aristotle

Aristotle's Fall - tapestry, Augustiner Museum - Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

The philosopher Mo Ti (later Mo Tsu)

In this image Archimedes is with his burning mirror -

According to Plutarch, Archimedes reflected the Sun's rays onto the Roman galleys and set them alight. Such a story, true or not, was too good for the medieval chroniclers over a thousand years later to resist. Like the tabloid journalists of their day, they embellished the tale with details of their own until history and legend became hopelessly intertwined. Some of these later writers say that Archimedes used the polished round shields of the Greek troops to concentrate the sunlight, while others insist that he focused the rays with a giant single mirror. Joannes Zonaras, a Byzantine historian of the twelfth century, wrote:

At last, in an incredible manner, he burned up the whole Roman fleet. For by tilting a kind of mirror he ignited the air from the beam and kindled a great flame, the whole of which he directed at the ships at anchor in the path of the fire, until he consumed them all.

Archimedes 287?bc 212 first noted aspects of the pigmentation change in plant tissue due to exposure to sunlight and since then photosynthesis has been central to much speculative and scientific investigation.