Early microphone

big mike

This is the sixth photo in the series by Angie Turnbull that she photographed here at the museum with some objects from our collection. Angie uses a Deardorff large format camera with a Honduras mahogany body (because timber accepts harder use better than metal) and leather bellows between the lens and film plane. Angie manipulates the flexible planes to control the image, focus area and adjust parallax errors and perspective. The camera captures images on a negative that is 8 x 10 inches (20,32 x 25,4 cm). Angie revails:

This beautiful object chosen by Campbell for the capability it has to capture sound but for me was its aesthetics and how wonderful the tonal smoothness would be in the final black and white image using the 8×10 sheet film used to capture it. With the Deardorff Camera I was able to use it’s tilt & shift capabilities to give this object the visual sense of size it’s physical presence already had. In the ‘Deardorff Project’ photography exhibition all the images were taken in reciprocity. Which means that the ability for the film to drink in light is drastically reduced and the shutter needs to stay open for longer to allow the film to be properly exposed under existing light conditions.

Photography by Angie Turnbull
© All rights reserved

Tags: black and white, collection, Deardorff, film, microphone, museum, sound

The Powerhouse Museum's Photo of the Day blog features a new image each day, chosen from the Powerhouse Photo Library.

The majority of these images have been taken by Museum photographers for a variety of purposes such as for exhibitions, of objects in our collection, events, behind-the-scenes and location shots. We also feature many images taken by our Flickr community and from our visitors. We hope you enjoy the photographs and stories.

The licensing of each image varies however we are trying to release as many as possible under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.1 license.