Time travel
Hi all. Just a short one this week as my relatively open calendar has rapidly become quite congested.
My DIY lightbox is getting put to good use.
I’ve made a start on my time travel project…diving into the vinegar* aroma of The Advocate neg archive. It has become very apparent that it is extremely easy for hours to just disappear while trawling through ledgers and neg packets chock-full of history.
To make my life easier I decided I needed a light box. My plan was to visit the local hardware retailer, buy a piece of white Perspex and add some sort of illumination using a few DIY skills. The smallest sheet of Perspex I could find was larger and more expensive than I really needed…bugger…but I was convinced I needed it. Next was the light source. I hit the electrical section and … BAM! …there it was.
What a find...the perfect lightbox.
The answer was staring me straight in the face. A LED exterior wall light…basically a grey metallic box containing a bank of LEDs covered with a rectangle of white acrylic…perfect. All I needed to do was attach a power cable to it instead of wiring onto the side of a building as intended. (If you want to copy this project make sure all electrical work is done by a qualified electrician).
It works perfectly and is even bright enough to photograph negs at reasonable exposure settings.
A large portion of The Advocate film archive is affected by vinegar syndrome to some degree. The handover to the Burnie Regional Museum can not come soon enough.
Well that's a wrap for this week.
Keep clicking...you are making history.
... until next week.