FAMILY FUN

New Zealand Tablet, 10 December 1908, Page 38

FAMILY FUN

Photography Without a Camera. — The up-to-date photographer knows how to make pictures without a camera. He will take, for instance, some flowers, squeeze the juice out of them, and with it saturate a sheet of ordinary paper. When the paper is dry some sort of picture can be printed on it by exposing it to the sun beneath a negative. Flower juice is a passable sensitizer. But paper itself is sensitive to light, and a sheet of it, placed in a printing frame with a negative in the usual fashion, will make a recognisable picture after a considerable exposure to the sun. The leaves of trees, at a pinch, may be utilised for a similar photographic purpose. The usual method of copying a photograph is to take a picture of it with the camera, developing the plate in the ordinary way. But, if necessary, tlie camera may be entirely dispensed with. Put a photograph in a printing frame with a piece of sensitized paper, using it just as if it were a negative, and, after proper exposure to the sun for only a few minutes, a print will be obtained. This print, of- course, will be a negative, and (after toning) it may be employed in exactly the same way for printing copies of the original picture. It is not impossible, in the absence of apparatus, to improvise a camera out of a hat, by inserting a spectacle lens in the middle of the crown and closing up the opening for the head with a piece of black cloth a piece of sensitized paper being attached to the inner surface. Indeed, the lens might be dispensed with, a pinhole in the top of the hat admitting the light.