Pinhole photography is one of the oldest and most basic forms of photography. Buildings, roads and trees are present, but people and vehicles are not, unless they were stationary for long periods of time. Only objects with some permanence appear in these images. Gaps within an arc represent times when the sun was obscured by clouds. The highest and lowest arcs in the sky occurred on the summer and winter solstices, respectively. The camera was installed in a CEOS office at the UM Fort Garry campus as the initial COVID-19 wave began to sweep through the province.Įach arc is the sun’s east-to-west trail for one day. It displays the daily path of the sun over the course of two years.
The accompanying image is a solargraph, captured by a pinhole camera with a very long exposure. But its diurnal rhythms over weeks and months can be recorded, not as a video or a sequence of still images, but as a single image. It occurs every day and we usually pay scarce attention to it. The sun’s daily journey east to west across the sky usually leaves no traces of itself. Here is Chan’s personal reflection on his effort: The image is an interesting and unique record of the pandemic and its effects on UM. His rudimentary science project produced a solargraph that showed the passage of the sun over the Parker and Allen buildings throughout the two years of the pandemic lockdown on the Fort Garry campus. But then the pandemic kept going, and going, and finally after more than two years away from the office he went in and discovered the result once restrictions were eased. Wayne Chan created a pinhole camera and just as the pandemic lockdown started he set it up in the window of the Wallace building before he left, thinking that he would retrieve it once the pandemic was over. When the pandemic forced most of us into lockdown in March 2020, even the UM campuses became quiet as staff and faculty began working from home.īut a forethinking staff member in the Centre for Earth Observation Science had an idea that ended up recording the stillness of human activity while the universe kept functioning, undashed by any virus.
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