dyed potato-starch was the basis of the Autochrome process that produced very early color-photographs...they look pretty amazing for being photographed on potato!
A few years ago, a few people from Kolari Vision flew out to my place, and we tried exposing my autochrome plates in their potato pinhole. That batch of autochromes was a bit slow just with a regular glass lens, so exposures were absurdly long, on the order of 8 hours or so. It *technically* worked, but there was certainly quite a bit of room for improvement. They put together a nice little video on the endeavor that I would recommend.
This was literally the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this potato-focused video about photography. "Hold on a second, are they going to talk about the Autochrome?"
yeah, the coolest part is that the thing that gives them the colour is also the thing that filters the colour going in, meaning that you can use it to take colour photographs in a monochrome camera
I tried, REALLY hard to do that, but couldn't make it happen. The original goal was a potato camera with potato film and a flash powered by potato batteries. But I had to settle for what you saw because it's as good as I could make it without spending months working on this very silly project.
@@thethoughtemporium There are plastics made with potato starch, i bet you could make a lense with that, then you could use a potato camera with potato lenses and potato film.
It's kind of a stretch, but there's also a type of color photography invented all the way back in 1903 called the Autochrome Lumière that makes use of potato starch. Making the plates is defintely a labor of love, but it's still cool to think you can take color photos with something you made in your garage.
You can take a photogram with a leaf without applying photosensitive chemicals on it! Just treat the leaf like normal photogram paper, just with a much longer exposure time. The parts of the leaf exposed to the light undergo photosynthesis much more effectively than the covered areas of the leaf, which the illuminated cells store as starch. To develop the photogram, you just soak it in an iodine solution (both tincture & povidone work). The iodine reacts with starch to form a dark color, and an image pops out like magic! The awesome thing about this method is the leaf itself is the photosensitive component! The iodine only brings out the image that was already there, just hidden.
As a biology student, I increasingly struggled with feeling like I had to find the one question or topic that I have a burning passion for, especially once I got into a PhD at an R1. I've come to realize that I'm driven by curiosity for everything and that focusing so narrowly on one topic just isn't right for me. A big part of that realization came from watching this channel. I've always been jealous that you have the ability to delve deeply into any question, regardless of field or discipline, and just pursue it doggedly until you're satisfied, then put it down. I've recently come to terms with the fact that I don't want to be an expert in a single topic, I want to be an expert jack of all trades. The thorough carefulness of your scientific techniques, ability to synthesize and distill knowledge, and excellent storytelling have been an inspiration to me for years
I'm the same way. I studded a master in Robotics. It was hard as f** but I loved it. Then I came out and started to works as a programmer for a company. From day one, I hated it. 3 month in I was considering jumping in front of the train. Got medicated but it did not fix the problem. A year later I got fired. I can not work for something I do not find curious and programming for the sake of paying my bills is not me. So right now I'm trying to start my own company where I can thrive again.
You might have adhd hahaha. I went into physics with the same curiosity that you're talking about here. My biggest issue was that I'd study way too wide of a range of things instead of studying exclusively what would be on the test. So although I had learned an absolute ton, none of it meant anything, because I still got terrible grades, because it wasn't what was on the test. I fucking hate how our education system works, because it's built to make good workers, not to satisfy curiosity. Our education systems continuously fail people who have genuine deep curiosity, not because we can't keep up with the education, but because the education can't keep up with us.
The history lesson on the naming of "Blueprints" was interesting. I heard about it when I was too young to understand, but you kickstarted those memories right back up.
Little trick about silver nitrate stains. If you get silver nitrate stain on your skin you can remove it using iodine solution. It reacts with the silver making silver iodide which will be removed by your body faster than the silver metal.
The danger of Silver Nitrate is not silver/grey/black fingers from contact. The real and present danger is forgetting your eye protection and getting it on your cornea and should be an added warning in this and other demo/instruction videos.
12:39 "This is called a cyanotype because of the incredible blue color" Wait, are cyanide and cyan the color related etymologically? Apparently they are: Cyanide was given its name from cyan (from Greek kyanos 'dark blue')
@@swssm4741 Considering that HCl is easily dissolved in water, where it splits into ions, we can say yes, it is a strong acid. I'm too afraid to know what your ''friend'' has in mind ;-)
The quality of the pin hole will make all the difference in image quality and exposure. In my early teens, I used the a flat peice of aluminum pie plate and placed a small dimple in the surface. Flip over and lightly sand with 1200 grit emery paper to remove the dimple to the desired pin hole size. This should be the side facing the photo sensitive medium. Attach the pin hole piece to the desired light tight apparatus (hollowed out potatoe). I preferred using oatmeal cartons as the camera body, which works outdoors since it was light tight. With the clear lids of today, place aluminum foil over the opening and hold in place with the lid.
A couple tips for curcumin anthotypes: 1) suspend the dye in gelatin, wet your watercolor paper, and coat the paper with a very thin layer of the suspension. Let dry. This will significantly increase your resolution, since you will have a denser and more even dye layer. 2) Before developing, wet your sensitized paper in ~10% H2O2. Keep it wet during development. This significantly increases the speed by which the UV light will develop the image. Using that method, I can develop an image of about 3x5” using the full frame of a 4,000 lumen DLP projector (really not the best tool for the job given the color wheel) in about 2 hours. Soak in normal water to remove the untreated H2O2 and then treat in a basic solution like you did. 3) Grab a transparent LCD meant for an SLA 3D printer. Use that for your exposures.
I discovered pin hole cameras as a small child long before ever hearing of them. Sitting in the back of an old box truck, you can usually find a few pin holes in the walls. Holding up a blank sheet of paper in front of one will reveal a perfect image of whatever's outside in that direction. If it's real dark (box trucks are usually nearly pitch dark inside with the doors closed), exposure is not really an issue. If it's daylight outside the image will be perfectly clear and highly visible. Even at night, if there's moonlight, or it's in an area with artificial lighting, the image is still quite good. As a child I'd use the box truck pin holes as drawing references, like using a projector to trace an image. Years later I saw in a book, and picture of how painters in the past would sit in a dark tent, with a pin hole projecting their subject onto their canvas. Pin holes are awesome.
It's fascinating to read how you discovered the camera obscura phenomenon for yourself, at such a young age. This kind of experience has likely happened countless times throughout human history, with only a fraction of such perceptions ever being recorded for posterity.
I accidentally spilled a large pot of curry stew all over my kitchen, with painted white cabinet doors. It all turned pale yellow. I was horrified and mortified! Scrubbing and washing did very little. However, a week or so later, the yellow had essentially gone away. Presumably, the yellow pigment was oxidized to something colorless by exposure to air.
Most blue prints were made with diazo dye technology later as the exposure and development was faster with ammonia vapour. Drafting offices would smell of window cleaner due to the plan copier sitting on warm standby all day.
@@KallePihlajasaari Cool! Thanks! I’m a life long, “rabbit hole” kind of person, and it continues to delight me how I couldn’t even begin to estimate how much I don’t know, I don’t know.🤣
@@IronicleseAndSardoniclese I get you. I get perverse pleasure in looking at random lab equipment for sale on the popular auction site, finding out what they do and how they work. Clicking on the suggested offers will usually find something new that I have never heard of even though I find my breadth of such arcane knowledge exceeds everyone I know though any specialist will know more about any given subject. Today's rabbit hole was Karl Fisher titrators, turns out people want ways to measure amount of water in liquids even if they cannot be evaporated to dryness.
@@RedTail1-1I knew that blueprints are called that because they were blue in the past, but I did not know why they were blue. Where did you learn that kinda obscure fact?
@@Jehty_ Read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" a 1959 novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr. for a cool spin on the topic. They also became blue and brown and direct positive using various diazo dye chemistries. These were faster and easier to develop, often with ammonia vapour but no longer had anything to do with cyanotype chemistry. The name stuck because of the traditional colour though the diazo ones were often more purple than blue. If one has any photography or engineering/architecture/cartography interests the history of the blue print copy system is easy to stumble over.
Iodine turns starch blue, I thought that’s what you sprayed when the potato turned blue. Might be possible to create a light sensitive mask on the potato, expose it, wash off the unreacted stuff, then spray with diluted iodine to produce an image. Probably won’t be better than the cyanotype, but it’d be a neat experiment I guess.
I was thinking the same thing! Sodium iodide is somewhat light-sensitive, decomposing into free iodine, which can later react with more iodide iones to form I3-. That's the specie that is capable of reacting with starch to form the blue complex
I remember back in the early 1990's experimenting with photo sensitive natural solutions etc. I developed simple photograms on banana skin using b/w negatives and a powerful UV light _(better results with a UV-C lamp but it's a dangerous light to have your skin exposed to)_ The results were quite good if you could keep the negative as flat against the banana skin as possible. If done properly, you get a reasonably sharp image. Would have been great to put cartoon characters and/or jokes/riddles onto bananas for the kids packed-lunch or parties etc.
I'm gonna assume you've already seen it, but SmarterEveryDay has a really long in-depth tour of the Kodak film plant. It's a bit higher tech than a potato, but this was fun and funny.
For the potato images, the next step is probably making paper out of potato fibers, then constructing an entire camera and film out of said fibers. Just because it SOUNDS easy probably doesn't mean it is, so I wouldn't mind if there wasn't a follow-up about it
As you already know, the Glass cuts most of highly chemically reactive short UV range (UV-C, UV-B, Half of UV-A). So use the fused quartz glass(transparent to most of UV-C to A range) instead of normal glass might work way better. BTW, many of plastic sheets cut not only UV-C, UV-B, but also UV-A...
I went to photography school 22 years ago. Right at the transition of digital and film. I love that you're discovering all this. You got quite the journey ahead of you. I can't wait to see it
None of this is my field of expertise, But I was thinking about the potato as film aspect. Perhaps if you were to take your sliced potato and cover it with smooth mashed potato it might actually work better, as a smoothe mashed potato shouldn't have as many pits in it when a thin layer is applied. Smooth mashed potatoes do end up with extra salt, butter, and milk added to it after it's peeled and boiled, then mashed till all clumps are removed. Either way, it makes for a nice side dish especially if you add a bit of cheese or gravy... Ooops, film. ;)
So as some people said, potatoes are the base of the autochrome process, invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers in Lyon (France). It is believed to be the first color photography process. The images are stunning and the resolution is great (I've seen some of them, it's really impressive). I'm not really sure how the process goes in details, but from what I know the starch is dyed with red green and blue pigments. It is then applied on a glass plate and a black and white emulsion (silver nitrate I guess) is applied on top of it. What is interesting though is that the Lumiere brothers realised that the resolution of the images was much better when the starch was crushed on the plate. So they had to invent a machine (the laminator) to industrially crush the starch evenly without breaking the glass. The pressure was something like 7 tons per square centimeter. If I remembrer correctly they won an industrial award only for the laminator. Anyway, I dream to be able to make autochromes prints one day, but from what I saw it's not impossible, but pretty difficult...
The hard part is not just the starch, but sensitizing the silver halide to blue and red, and then color balancing that with the quantity of each of the pigmented potato starches to balance the color to daylight, since it's really hard to get it just right.
From my own experiments with calotype photography (aka salt print), silver iodide is more sensitive than chloride and you can produce it using drug store iodine tincture, having an excess of nitrate in your plate helps sensitivity. Calotype paper can be developed with caffenol (a homebrew instant coffee-based developer) and the developer can be substituted with plain ammonia solution from the hardware store but I dont recommend this, it is foul. I just used it because stores in my country don't carry thiosulfate for some reason
10:30 If I needed to take a picture of some perfectly golden charred potato slices for a menu, this process looks amazing, just as a subject rather than a medium
I first learned about blueprints, the camera obscura effect, and pinhole cameras when i took black and white film photography in high school. Our teacher tought us a summarized history of photography throughout the year for first year / beginner photography. I remember falling in love with the works by Ansel Adams which she would highlight when talking about different styles of exposure and composition. I really miss her class.
Yep, also for shaving nicks and removing warts back in the day. One has to be careful though, it is not called Lunar Caustic for nothing. Styptic pencil I think came later after the Caustic pencil.
you could have tried using silver iodide instead of silver chloride on the potato and sort of get a double developinbg effect from the silver forming and the starch reacting with the iodine :D
Actually I was thinking the same exact thing. As soon as I saw the blue color on the potato iodometry came to mind and that made me into thinking that a different type of development might be achieved using a solution of sodium iodide for example, which is still somewhat light-sensitive
In 2000, on french television, a man showed how to use a shoebox to make a pinhole camera (the aperture is a tiny hole in some aluminum taped in front, the interior of the box must be completly black) , with "photographic" paper made by mixing potassium dichromate and albumin. He then stayed multiple hours immobile under the sun in front of the Eiffel Tower... The result was an exposed piece of paper where the negative was revealed using black pigment (it sticks to the cooked albumine). To have your positive, use "unexposed" paper sandwiched with the negative between two glass panels and leave it under the sun for a while. Add some pigment, rinse and voilà! You have a beautiful photo. He explained that considering the knowledge at the time, Egyptians could have taken some photos of the pyramids being built using this process.
I did a lot of photography in high school and this video taught me so much about what was actually taking place during the photography and development and printing phases. I found it fascinating. Thank you.
Really nice video, but your definition of focal length at 3:32 is way of. You are talking about depth of field not focal length. One mistake for a 30 min video is pretty though! Keep them coming!
One of my favorite classes I took in college was history of photography. The early decades of professional photography are captivating, like in the Civil War there were field photographers who would follow platoons around with big carts carrying all the chemicals needed to develop the photos on the battlefield. It's crazy to think somebody would be genius enough to figure out how to take the first ever photograph of the view from their window on a piece of metal in 1826
I heard a theory that the shroud of Turin is a photograph made by Leonardo in a camera obscura, basically a pinhole camera that you can get into. He made a statue and exposed it onto linen soaked in a silver solution
upon seeing the blue image in the thumbnail i immediately thought of iodine seeing as how iodine and potato starch react so i was surprised that wasnt in the video
Instead of a potato pin cam, you could make a potato lens by collecting potato starch with water and let it dry in a round cup, the result will be opaque. But when cooked, it will get translucent.
Neat idea, I would not expect much UV to get through but it might work for silver chemistry. One could use a Boba starch ball as a proxy though they may be rice or wheat starch but not sure. There might be potato tapioca in big size that would be ready to make a spherical lens.
hey there! i actually do a lot of these alternative processes. You can get drastically better results in your salted prints by adding in some potassium dichromate 2% solution. i hope you give a try because im sure you'll like the results a lot more
My goal was to never use chrome salts for these processes, even though I know they'd make it easier. While they do make it better, I don't want to deal with the acute toxicity of working with them.
@@thethoughtemporium fully understand, and it makes sense why you wouldn’t use it in a video like this, was just suggesting you give it a try in your spare time! Salt prints are loads of fun!
@@thethoughtemporium This is a great video like all you have made. Adding a further warning somewhere (pinned post?) about silver nitrate in the eye would be beneficial to those that follow your experiments without further reading and understanding the dangers.
“If there is anything that embodies the Artist that has come into discussion; be it love of innovation, creativity, spontaneity, creation entirely out of one’s self, etc. It is the potato.” -Friedrich Huebach talking about his friend and patient Sigmar Polke, (creator of the Apparatus whereby one Potato Orbits Another/Kartoffelmachinen)
A time machine powered by potatoes reminds me of "the long earth" by terry pratchet and steven baxter, an eccetrinc inventor made a device that allows you to "step" "east" or "west" through universes, and its second version, that he released to the public as plans, on the internet, FOR FREE, was powered by a potato, because somehow, potatoes, or at least potatoe like things, exist in every universe that has an earth. (Yes, some dont have an earth, making traveling the "long earth" dangerous in more ways than one, so eventually they made airtight airships that could "step" in order to make travel safer, and faster.)
Oh man, I haven't thought about the Long Earth series in forever. The more dramatic tone made Terry's witticisms stand out especially well. I still need to read the last few-I felt a little too sad about Pratchett's death at the time, but now I think I can appreciate them more.
Same! My local pibrary had the audiobook in stock, hoopla recommended it to me, and i was hooked in just the first few minutes. Have always loved pratchet, and had just finished a baxter binge right before, it was fate. Another good book, dont remember the title, it was baxter and arthur c clark working together to tell a time travel story about various people soldiers from ww1 and 2, and vietnam, rudyard kipling and the soldiers he was with in india, alexander the great, ghengis khan, etc etc, people from all over history, being sucked into a "battle wirld" type place, made up of chunks of earth from various times mashed together, it was a WILD RIDE of a story, i REALLY WISH I COULD REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS CALLED!
In the videogame Prey from 2017, they have (among other things) genetically engineered tomatoes called Jamon Tomatoes, engineered to taste like jamon ham. I think this could be a cool thing to make, especially if the seeds were made available. I personally would give probably about 100 dollars for a packet of seeds
here’s a seemingly complicated ochem project: if you ever manage to reverse engineer the developers used for Kodachrome, that would be very cool. tons of people have this film lying around and have to develop it as black and white because the chemicals for color are no longer made. The dye couplers and their chemical formulae are out there (I have them in a text file somewhere) so the main problem would be actually figuring out how to synthesize them
You got my hopes up on that pin hole vs lens tease. I thought with all the TH-cam videos of making various things like veggies and wood transparent, you had worked out a potato lens. De-brining the potato (ironic, as the potato is usually a debriner) and using a wire rack in that process, a long with a bottom draining pan, you were going to pull the whole thing together. Either way, it's better than the Packard Bell PC Buddy or whatever it was called in, like, 1996.
I wonder if compressing the potato to be thinner will fill in the holes the potato has naturally since it’s porous. If you dry the potato out, and compress it it might be similar enough in texture to paper, allowing a closer print
Finally a camera i can use for ufo's
😂
Also Nessie, Bigfoot, Yeti and security cctv.
Gold comment
Nah the image is too sharp
And bigfoot!
The ingestion warning seemed excesive but then I remembered the potatos and I could totally see someone serving these for an anniversary or something.
The turmeric method should be fine, if you don't add the borax
@@LurpakSpreadableButter I choose to avoid this discussion for liability reasons 😂
@@LurpakSpreadableButter only if you use a food safe alcohol...... or can be sure that you completely remove it.
Guess what? Human stomach acid is dilute hydrochloric plus enzymes.
If you used turmeric with vodka as your solvent, you could get double potato!
"make sure you coat the same side you salted" tells me you probably spent some time quite confused why it didnt work xD
frankly it seemed like very specific advice to give
dyed potato-starch was the basis of the Autochrome process that produced very early color-photographs...they look pretty amazing for being photographed on potato!
Having watched way too many technology connections videos that's where I thought this was headed intitially. 😅
Same
A few years ago, a few people from Kolari Vision flew out to my place, and we tried exposing my autochrome plates in their potato pinhole. That batch of autochromes was a bit slow just with a regular glass lens, so exposures were absurdly long, on the order of 8 hours or so. It *technically* worked, but there was certainly quite a bit of room for improvement. They put together a nice little video on the endeavor that I would recommend.
This was literally the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this potato-focused video about photography.
"Hold on a second, are they going to talk about the Autochrome?"
yeah, the coolest part is that the thing that gives them the colour is also the thing that filters the colour going in, meaning that you can use it to take colour photographs in a monochrome camera
I assumed the video would end with a Potato pinhole camera with a potato powered led lamp with a potato film taking a picture of a potato
I tried, REALLY hard to do that, but couldn't make it happen. The original goal was a potato camera with potato film and a flash powered by potato batteries. But I had to settle for what you saw because it's as good as I could make it without spending months working on this very silly project.
@@thethoughtemporium There are plastics made with potato starch, i bet you could make a lense with that, then you could use a potato camera with potato lenses and potato film.
@@thethoughtemporium Did you consider going with the old-fashioned magnesium based powder flash? You could sit that on a carved potato, no problem.
@@Steamrick Yup. Was gonna ignite it with an arc from potato batteries for the flash.
Wouldn't that burn the potato?
It's kind of a stretch, but there's also a type of color photography invented all the way back in 1903 called the Autochrome Lumière that makes use of potato starch. Making the plates is defintely a labor of love, but it's still cool to think you can take color photos with something you made in your garage.
Yes, there was a time we ran gels on starch plates in the lab and they were the devil to pour and set without bubbles.
You can take a photogram with a leaf without applying photosensitive chemicals on it!
Just treat the leaf like normal photogram paper, just with a much longer exposure time. The parts of the leaf exposed to the light undergo photosynthesis much more effectively than the covered areas of the leaf, which the illuminated cells store as starch.
To develop the photogram, you just soak it in an iodine solution (both tincture & povidone work). The iodine reacts with starch to form a dark color, and an image pops out like magic!
The awesome thing about this method is the leaf itself is the photosensitive component! The iodine only brings out the image that was already there, just hidden.
As a biology student, I increasingly struggled with feeling like I had to find the one question or topic that I have a burning passion for, especially once I got into a PhD at an R1. I've come to realize that I'm driven by curiosity for everything and that focusing so narrowly on one topic just isn't right for me. A big part of that realization came from watching this channel. I've always been jealous that you have the ability to delve deeply into any question, regardless of field or discipline, and just pursue it doggedly until you're satisfied, then put it down. I've recently come to terms with the fact that I don't want to be an expert in a single topic, I want to be an expert jack of all trades. The thorough carefulness of your scientific techniques, ability to synthesize and distill knowledge, and excellent storytelling have been an inspiration to me for years
specialization is for insects
@@diggy_the_first best phrase of the month
I'm the same way. I studded a master in Robotics. It was hard as f** but I loved it. Then I came out and started to works as a programmer for a company. From day one, I hated it. 3 month in I was considering jumping in front of the train. Got medicated but it did not fix the problem. A year later I got fired. I can not work for something I do not find curious and programming for the sake of paying my bills is not me. So right now I'm trying to start my own company where I can thrive again.
Dude! I went down a “The Karate Kid, analyzed by a Karate expert” rabbit hole yesterday…No subject is off limits when you are a curious person! 😂😂😂
You might have adhd hahaha.
I went into physics with the same curiosity that you're talking about here. My biggest issue was that I'd study way too wide of a range of things instead of studying exclusively what would be on the test.
So although I had learned an absolute ton, none of it meant anything, because I still got terrible grades, because it wasn't what was on the test.
I fucking hate how our education system works, because it's built to make good workers, not to satisfy curiosity. Our education systems continuously fail people who have genuine deep curiosity, not because we can't keep up with the education, but because the education can't keep up with us.
First 9 seconds of this video can be made into an yousuckatcooking short and noone would bat an eye.
you’re so right
This is my first time hearing about anthotyping. Now I wanna make a super-long-exposure pinhole camera using stuff from the grocery store.
I tried it once and i think it took 3 days on very sunny days but it worth it
Me too
Same thoughts, or even adding a lens and have a quite-long-exposure camera
@@nonridiculousadjective6597It would be hard to nail the focus tough
I think it would be cool to do a year-long exposure with the pinhole camera bolted to something sturdy.
26:01 Looks like about 240p or 360p, and that tracks, as that's typically when the "was this recorded on a potato" comments come out 😂
The history lesson on the naming of "Blueprints" was interesting.
I heard about it when I was too young to understand, but you kickstarted those memories right back up.
Little trick about silver nitrate stains. If you get silver nitrate stain on your skin you can remove it using iodine solution. It reacts with the silver making silver iodide which will be removed by your body faster than the silver metal.
The danger of Silver Nitrate is not silver/grey/black fingers from contact. The real and present danger is forgetting your eye protection and getting it on your cornea and should be an added warning in this and other demo/instruction videos.
Iodine stains lol. But I'm sure it goes away faster
@@ManIam41 I have not heard that Iodine is suitable for the eye but a temporary Iodine stain would be preferable to a permanent silver stain.
with how the silver price is hiking you probably better off leaving that silver there for a while though
12:39 "This is called a cyanotype because of the incredible blue color"
Wait, are cyanide and cyan the color related etymologically?
Apparently they are:
Cyanide was given its name from cyan (from Greek kyanos 'dark blue')
A fun addition is that cyanide is CN (Carbon and Nitrogen). Easy to remember CyaNide. 😊
I'm pretty much certain that *that* is a coincidence though.
@@phizc How have I never noticed that
Does stomach acid count as a "strong acid"? Asking for a friend
@@swssm4741 Considering that HCl is easily dissolved in water, where it splits into ions, we can say yes, it is a strong acid.
I'm too afraid to know what your ''friend'' has in mind ;-)
@@swssm4741 HCl is considered a strong acid, but it is quite dilute in your stomach so in effect is not very strong.
The quality of the pin hole will make all the difference in image quality and exposure. In my early teens, I used the a flat peice of aluminum pie plate and placed a small dimple in the surface. Flip over and lightly sand with 1200 grit emery paper to remove the dimple to the desired pin hole size. This should be the side facing the photo sensitive medium. Attach the pin hole piece to the desired light tight apparatus (hollowed out potatoe). I preferred using oatmeal cartons as the camera body, which works outdoors since it was light tight. With the clear lids of today, place aluminum foil over the opening and hold in place with the lid.
A couple tips for curcumin anthotypes:
1) suspend the dye in gelatin, wet your watercolor paper, and coat the paper with a very thin layer of the suspension. Let dry. This will significantly increase your resolution, since you will have a denser and more even dye layer.
2) Before developing, wet your sensitized paper in ~10% H2O2. Keep it wet during development. This significantly increases the speed by which the UV light will develop the image. Using that method, I can develop an image of about 3x5” using the full frame of a 4,000 lumen DLP projector (really not the best tool for the job given the color wheel) in about 2 hours. Soak in normal water to remove the untreated H2O2 and then treat in a basic solution like you did.
3) Grab a transparent LCD meant for an SLA 3D printer. Use that for your exposures.
That sound cool. Please point people to some examples.
17:09 That's a UV filter (L37) on the end of your camera lens. Your long exposure might go a little quicker without it!
Might need to specifically seek out a lens without a uv coating wing might be tricky
Like a UV Nikkor lens. It's not just coatings, glass absorbs UV so the special lenses use thinner elements and flourite if nessesary.@@danl6634
I discovered pin hole cameras as a small child long before ever hearing of them. Sitting in the back of an old box truck, you can usually find a few pin holes in the walls. Holding up a blank sheet of paper in front of one will reveal a perfect image of whatever's outside in that direction. If it's real dark (box trucks are usually nearly pitch dark inside with the doors closed), exposure is not really an issue. If it's daylight outside the image will be perfectly clear and highly visible. Even at night, if there's moonlight, or it's in an area with artificial lighting, the image is still quite good. As a child I'd use the box truck pin holes as drawing references, like using a projector to trace an image.
Years later I saw in a book, and picture of how painters in the past would sit in a dark tent, with a pin hole projecting their subject onto their canvas. Pin holes are awesome.
It's fascinating to read how you discovered the camera obscura phenomenon for yourself, at such a young age. This kind of experience has likely happened countless times throughout human history, with only a fraction of such perceptions ever being recorded for posterity.
Okay, now we need a lemon car
Theoretically possible
Ya
unironically this
Or that apple car from that childrens book
"Driving a lemon?"
Maybe try sanding and polishing the freeze dried potato slices? The smooth surface might make the photos come out clearer.
Watch this in 144p for the authentic potato experience.
the p stands for "potato" at that scale
LOL!
House hippos man what a throwback
my mind had a 15 year flashback when I saw that
The first few minutes make me feel like I'm on crack
i'm on
@@halfsineyou’re on
@@LaMelonhi
I am and it was still weird.
@@LaMelon we're on
I accidentally spilled a large pot of curry stew all over my kitchen, with painted white cabinet doors. It all turned pale yellow. I was horrified and mortified! Scrubbing and washing did very little. However, a week or so later, the yellow had essentially gone away. Presumably, the yellow pigment was oxidized to something colorless by exposure to air.
Yeah, curry stains on cooking ware can also be removed by putting it into sunlight
fascinating!
(and so so sad. Floor curry is the only bad kind of curry)
Probably from turmeric! The dye in that is wild.
Edit: LOL turmeric mentioned 10 seconds later in the video, bahaha
@@inxomnyaa So what you're saying is that curry can be used as a photographic emulsion. Interesting. Wonder if there's a way to fix the image...
14:22 Me literally out loud: “Ooooooohhhhhhhh! Dat why blueprints!” 😂😂😂
Quick and shmart, I am!
Most blue prints were made with diazo dye technology later as the exposure and development was faster with ammonia vapour. Drafting offices would smell of window cleaner due to the plan copier sitting on warm standby all day.
@@KallePihlajasaari Cool! Thanks! I’m a life long, “rabbit hole” kind of person, and it continues to delight me how I couldn’t even begin to estimate how much I don’t know, I don’t know.🤣
@@IronicleseAndSardoniclese I get you. I get perverse pleasure in looking at random lab equipment for sale on the popular auction site, finding out what they do and how they work. Clicking on the suggested offers will usually find something new that I have never heard of even though I find my breadth of such arcane knowledge exceeds everyone I know though any specialist will know more about any given subject. Today's rabbit hole was Karl Fisher titrators, turns out people want ways to measure amount of water in liquids even if they cannot be evaporated to dryness.
Expectation: making a potato camera.
The hidend video's title: why blueprints are called blueprints
RIGHT!? My face 😮. I love learning stuff like that!!
Do people really not know that?..
@@RedTail1-1 I find that people don't know most things, on average.
@@RedTail1-1I knew that blueprints are called that because they were blue in the past, but I did not know why they were blue.
Where did you learn that kinda obscure fact?
@@Jehty_ Read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" a 1959 novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr. for a cool spin on the topic.
They also became blue and brown and direct positive using various diazo dye chemistries. These were faster and easier to develop, often with ammonia vapour but no longer had anything to do with cyanotype chemistry. The name stuck because of the traditional colour though the diazo ones were often more purple than blue.
If one has any photography or engineering/architecture/cartography interests the history of the blue print copy system is easy to stumble over.
NileRed: I have to be careful
The Thought Emporium: You have to be careful
TTE > Nile
Ah you see this is because, powerful as NileRed may be, *he* is mortal.
@@eloryosnak4100unlike NileBlue, who is definitely immortal
so you mean, we now can use potatoe as a power source AND take a screenshot of doom?
damn, doom roun really on a potatoe
potato starch was actually used for early color photography in the Autochrome Lumière process
Iodine turns starch blue, I thought that’s what you sprayed when the potato turned blue.
Might be possible to create a light sensitive mask on the potato, expose it, wash off the unreacted stuff, then spray with diluted iodine to produce an image. Probably won’t be better than the cyanotype, but it’d be a neat experiment I guess.
I was thinking the same thing! Sodium iodide is somewhat light-sensitive, decomposing into free iodine, which can later react with more iodide iones to form I3-. That's the specie that is capable of reacting with starch to form the blue complex
i'm dissapointed it is not what vudeo actually about
could call it a pho-tato.
i shall see myself out
I remember back in the early 1990's experimenting with photo sensitive natural solutions etc. I developed simple photograms on banana skin using b/w negatives and a powerful UV light _(better results with a UV-C lamp but it's a dangerous light to have your skin exposed to)_ The results were quite good if you could keep the negative as flat against the banana skin as possible. If done properly, you get a reasonably sharp image. Would have been great to put cartoon characters and/or jokes/riddles onto bananas for the kids packed-lunch or parties etc.
I'm gonna assume you've already seen it, but SmarterEveryDay has a really long in-depth tour of the Kodak film plant. It's a bit higher tech than a potato, but this was fun and funny.
For the potato images, the next step is probably making paper out of potato fibers, then constructing an entire camera and film out of said fibers. Just because it SOUNDS easy probably doesn't mean it is, so I wouldn't mind if there wasn't a follow-up about it
4:57 Is that NileRed lmao
They are friends. He has used some of nile reds equipment in the past.
Who else?
It is. Completely missed him.
Actually super thrilled about the tube rack. I'm going to use this to organize sewing supplies, this is perfect for small embellishments.
As you already know, the Glass cuts most of highly chemically reactive short UV range (UV-C, UV-B, Half of UV-A). So use the fused quartz glass(transparent to most of UV-C to A range) instead of normal glass might work way better. BTW, many of plastic sheets cut not only UV-C, UV-B, but also UV-A...
I went to photography school 22 years ago. Right at the transition of digital and film. I love that you're discovering all this. You got quite the journey ahead of you. I can't wait to see it
0:20 HOUSE HIPPO MENTIONED
yo mommas a house hippo
Canadian confirmed.
@@AMan-xz7tx yo mommas a house hippo 🤣🤣🤣🪠👟🧯🥱
So where exactly can I get one of these? Do they have them on Amazon? 😂
@@AMan-xz7tx yo mommas a house hippo 🤣🤣🤣🦛
None of this is my field of expertise, But I was thinking about the potato as film aspect. Perhaps if you were to take your sliced potato and cover it with smooth mashed potato it might actually work better, as a smoothe mashed potato shouldn't have as many pits in it when a thin layer is applied. Smooth mashed potatoes do end up with extra salt, butter, and milk added to it after it's peeled and boiled, then mashed till all clumps are removed. Either way, it makes for a nice side dish especially if you add a bit of cheese or gravy... Ooops, film. ;)
BAD APPLE ON A POTATO 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
First we play Doom on a potato powered computer, then we make a potato slide show of Bad Apple. It has to happen.
its only a matter of time
Bad potato
Bad apple on an apple?
@@Internetzspacezshipzbelieve it or not, someone did that by carving every frame (not sure if it was by hand or in blender)
It doesn’t matter what this channel uploads: I‘m always absolutely terrified.
Next step 4k 120 potatoes.
nice pfp
@@LaMelon yours aswell, comrade
I can't believe you did not take a photo of a potato, with a potato, with potato film.
So as some people said, potatoes are the base of the autochrome process, invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers in Lyon (France). It is believed to be the first color photography process. The images are stunning and the resolution is great (I've seen some of them, it's really impressive). I'm not really sure how the process goes in details, but from what I know the starch is dyed with red green and blue pigments. It is then applied on a glass plate and a black and white emulsion (silver nitrate I guess) is applied on top of it. What is interesting though is that the Lumiere brothers realised that the resolution of the images was much better when the starch was crushed on the plate. So they had to invent a machine (the laminator) to industrially crush the starch evenly without breaking the glass. The pressure was something like 7 tons per square centimeter. If I remembrer correctly they won an industrial award only for the laminator. Anyway, I dream to be able to make autochromes prints one day, but from what I saw it's not impossible, but pretty difficult...
The hard part is not just the starch, but sensitizing the silver halide to blue and red, and then color balancing that with the quantity of each of the pigmented potato starches to balance the color to daylight, since it's really hard to get it just right.
@@mikafoxx2717 ohh I didn't know, but that's very interesting thanks :)
From my own experiments with calotype photography (aka salt print), silver iodide is more sensitive than chloride and you can produce it using drug store iodine tincture, having an excess of nitrate in your plate helps sensitivity.
Calotype paper can be developed with caffenol (a homebrew instant coffee-based developer) and the developer can be substituted with plain ammonia solution from the hardware store but I dont recommend this, it is foul. I just used it because stores in my country don't carry thiosulfate for some reason
Could use the potato plant itself, use the fiber to make the photo paper, a thicker paper can also be be used to make the camera.
I didn't expect to watch someone make a camera of potatoes, but I will watch it
10:30 If I needed to take a picture of some perfectly golden charred potato slices for a menu, this process looks amazing, just as a subject rather than a medium
3:20 hmmm... a small aperture... potatoes...
I first learned about blueprints, the camera obscura effect, and pinhole cameras when i took black and white film photography in high school. Our teacher tought us a summarized history of photography throughout the year for first year / beginner photography. I remember falling in love with the works by Ansel Adams which she would highlight when talking about different styles of exposure and composition. I really miss her class.
0:42 The payoff of Po-Ta-To-Es by Samuel has hit me hard
SamWISE, mate.
wow i’ve recently seen 2 house hippo commercials in youtube videos. absolutely loved that ad as a kid
i like how much you can learn by just deciding to do something quite silly.
Oh the House Hippo, a nice bit of nostalgia made me smile. Thank you.
"What is the resolution of a Potato?"
That's a brand new sentence right there. Never said before 😂
Depending on the type of potato? Starchy or waxy?
20:45 Silver nitrate is also used to cauterize serious nosebleeds. 🙃
Yep, also for shaving nicks and removing warts back in the day. One has to be careful though, it is not called Lunar Caustic for nothing. Styptic pencil I think came later after the Caustic pencil.
THE HOUSE HIPPO 😂😂😂😂
Also i am also a fan of potatoes but my last name means potato so i think that makes me like them more than i would if it didnt 😂
it's exam season and instead of studying i'm now once again hyperfocusing on old timey photographic methods. amazing.
you could have tried using silver iodide instead of silver chloride on the potato and sort of get a double developinbg effect from the silver forming and the starch reacting with the iodine :D
Actually I was thinking the same exact thing. As soon as I saw the blue color on the potato iodometry came to mind and that made me into thinking that a different type of development might be achieved using a solution of sodium iodide for example, which is still somewhat light-sensitive
In 2000, on french television, a man showed how to use a shoebox to make a pinhole camera (the aperture is a tiny hole in some aluminum taped in front, the interior of the box must be completly black) , with "photographic" paper made by mixing potassium dichromate and albumin.
He then stayed multiple hours immobile under the sun in front of the Eiffel Tower...
The result was an exposed piece of paper where the negative was revealed using black pigment (it sticks to the cooked albumine). To have your positive, use "unexposed" paper sandwiched with the negative between two glass panels and leave it under the sun for a while.
Add some pigment, rinse and voilà! You have a beautiful photo.
He explained that considering the knowledge at the time, Egyptians could have taken some photos of the pyramids being built using this process.
0:40 one could say… he just thinks they’re neat…
I did a lot of photography in high school and this video taught me so much about what was actually taking place during the photography and development and printing phases. I found it fascinating. Thank you.
0:47 I regret to inform anyone who doesn’t know. But, potato’s are native to the Americas
Peru is in the Americas.
@@Teshia yes. It is.
Oh now i see my mistake.
Commented and thumbs'ed up for the "all dressed chip" joke at 23:30. Amazing. 10/10 setup.
Really nice video, but your definition of focal length at 3:32 is way of. You are talking about depth of field not focal length. One mistake for a 30 min video is pretty though! Keep them coming!
One of my favorite classes I took in college was history of photography. The early decades of professional photography are captivating, like in the Civil War there were field photographers who would follow platoons around with big carts carrying all the chemicals needed to develop the photos on the battlefield. It's crazy to think somebody would be genius enough to figure out how to take the first ever photograph of the view from their window on a piece of metal in 1826
We got an actual potato camera before GTA 6
This is the best comment I've seen this year, thank you
the way things are going, we'll have GTA 7 before we get GTA 6
We got a potato camera 6 years ago way before this comment trend… corridor crew did it back in 2018 making a potato camera…
I heard a theory that the shroud of Turin is a photograph made by Leonardo in a camera obscura, basically a pinhole camera that you can get into. He made a statue and exposed it onto linen soaked in a silver solution
"Potato obscura" rather than "camera obscura."
Love your and your teams work say whens the video on the grilled hotdog thermite thing coming out?
Man, this is real content.
upon seeing the blue image in the thumbnail i immediately thought of iodine seeing as how iodine and potato starch react so i was surprised that wasnt in the video
Hear me out, cook the potato slices instead of dehydrating them, it might help with the problem of over absorbing the chemicals
Instead of a potato pin cam, you could make a potato lens by collecting potato starch with water and let it dry in a round cup, the result will be opaque. But when cooked, it will get translucent.
Neat idea, I would not expect much UV to get through but it might work for silver chemistry. One could use a Boba starch ball as a proxy though they may be rice or wheat starch but not sure. There might be potato tapioca in big size that would be ready to make a spherical lens.
hey there! i actually do a lot of these alternative processes. You can get drastically better results in your salted prints by adding in some potassium dichromate 2% solution. i hope you give a try because im sure you'll like the results a lot more
My goal was to never use chrome salts for these processes, even though I know they'd make it easier. While they do make it better, I don't want to deal with the acute toxicity of working with them.
@@thethoughtemporium fully understand, and it makes sense why you wouldn’t use it in a video like this, was just suggesting you give it a try in your spare time! Salt prints are loads of fun!
@@thethoughtemporium This is a great video like all you have made.
Adding a further warning somewhere (pinned post?) about silver nitrate in the eye would be beneficial to those that follow your experiments without further reading and understanding the dangers.
“If there is anything that embodies the Artist that has come into discussion; be it love of innovation, creativity, spontaneity, creation entirely out of one’s self, etc. It is the potato.” -Friedrich Huebach talking about his friend and patient Sigmar Polke, (creator of the Apparatus whereby one Potato Orbits Another/Kartoffelmachinen)
Eventually this guy is gonna make a rock think
I would actually like a video on fossilization
@@mikkelens I think they're talking about making something that can compute.
Well, the first color photography was done with potato starch in autochrome process.
15:11 is that potato Feynman?
The etymology of "blueprint" is not something I anticipated. What a welcome surprise.
Guess what give blue jeans their colour. Why does the woad plant also provide the same dye as the indigo plant?
A time machine powered by potatoes reminds me of "the long earth" by terry pratchet and steven baxter, an eccetrinc inventor made a device that allows you to "step" "east" or "west" through universes, and its second version, that he released to the public as plans, on the internet, FOR FREE, was powered by a potato, because somehow, potatoes, or at least potatoe like things, exist in every universe that has an earth. (Yes, some dont have an earth, making traveling the "long earth" dangerous in more ways than one, so eventually they made airtight airships that could "step" in order to make travel safer, and faster.)
Oh man, I haven't thought about the Long Earth series in forever. The more dramatic tone made Terry's witticisms stand out especially well. I still need to read the last few-I felt a little too sad about Pratchett's death at the time, but now I think I can appreciate them more.
Same! My local pibrary had the audiobook in stock, hoopla recommended it to me, and i was hooked in just the first few minutes. Have always loved pratchet, and had just finished a baxter binge right before, it was fate.
Another good book, dont remember the title, it was baxter and arthur c clark working together to tell a time travel story about various people soldiers from ww1 and 2, and vietnam, rudyard kipling and the soldiers he was with in india, alexander the great, ghengis khan, etc etc, people from all over history, being sucked into a "battle wirld" type place, made up of chunks of earth from various times mashed together, it was a WILD RIDE of a story, i REALLY WISH I COULD REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS CALLED!
In the videogame Prey from 2017, they have (among other things) genetically engineered tomatoes called Jamon Tomatoes, engineered to taste like jamon ham. I think this could be a cool thing to make, especially if the seeds were made available. I personally would give probably about 100 dollars for a packet of seeds
This man's content is just really really amazing and underrated
The gradual build up from a potato camera joke to actual photochemistry is genuinely impressive
Next video: Genetically modifying sunlight to charge my phone wirelessly
Wait what
How do you... genetically modify the... sun?
@@KurosakiYukigoVery carefully
Could you use only everclear and turmeric to make it like safe to eat on the potato?
Hope you're a great day
Hey man how's the neurons going?
theyŕe still thinking, soo good i guess. Thanks for asking :)
That commercial brought back so much as a Canadian child growing up up lmao
1:12 Obvious AI slop.
Who cares?
@@LC-mq8iq mike młume)
@@LC-mq8iq me and the other guy
@@LC-mq8iqme and the two other guys
@@apathetic_aesthetics @mqb3gofjzkko7nzx38
@V6HAVOC
you all clearly have no life then
here’s a seemingly complicated ochem project: if you ever manage to reverse engineer the developers used for Kodachrome, that would be very cool. tons of people have this film lying around and have to develop it as black and white because the chemicals for color are no longer made. The dye couplers and their chemical formulae are out there (I have them in a text file somewhere) so the main problem would be actually figuring out how to synthesize them
this fucking guy is always up to something. can't wait to see what he gets up to next
(You understand that turmeric, and most vegetable dies, are NOT light-fast, and you can fade a stain with sunlight, or particular UV lights.)
clickbait title. you didn't make a potatocam, you made potato paper. poper... patato... papato... potater! POTATER! :D
I would be totally interested in seeing an ambrotype made. I feel the chemistry would be perfect for this channel
5:25 "absolutely do not ingest anything we're gonna be working with today"
so..... i can't eat the potato camera?
You got my hopes up on that pin hole vs lens tease. I thought with all the TH-cam videos of making various things like veggies and wood transparent, you had worked out a potato lens. De-brining the potato (ironic, as the potato is usually a debriner) and using a wire rack in that process, a long with a bottom draining pan, you were going to pull the whole thing together. Either way, it's better than the Packard Bell PC Buddy or whatever it was called in, like, 1996.
Potato AI when?
This whole video is cool, but I definitely liked immediately at the house hippo commercial. Best Concerned children's advertisers commercial
the average android camera
don't kill me for this guys, i am an android user myself
I wonder if compressing the potato to be thinner will fill in the holes the potato has naturally since it’s porous. If you dry the potato out, and compress it it might be similar enough in texture to paper, allowing a closer print