The Environmental Journal of Southern Appalachia

In throwback to early naturalist techniques, Big Camera! helps us picture plants under the sun

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big cameraDonna Moore and Anna Lawrence are pictured at a Big Camera! event in May at Ijams Nature Center in South Knoxville. Ben Pounds/Hellbender PressLessons in early and enduring photo techniques are an organic way to spread the arts and cultivate love of nature

KNOXVILLE — Donna Moore and Anna Lawrence showed people how to take photos with the sun.

The method, demonstrated this spring at Ijams Nature Center, involved putting one or more leaves on photo paper and spraying it with two sprays. One spray contained lemon and water. The other contained water with vinegar.

Children then placed these leaves on wet photo paper in the sun. The sun’s light gives a permanent impression of the leaf on the paper.

“Art is really accessible to anyone,” Lawrence said about the lesson the cyanotype printing project teaches both children and adults. The images came off as bluish purple on a gray background.

Lawrence and Moore said the activity also teaches appreciation of the natural world. Moore said similar techniques at the time of photography’s birth mainly allowed for people to identify plants.

She gave the example of English botanist Anna Atkins, who lived from 1799 to 1871. Atkins made the first photos to be published in a book. She used early photographic methods with sunlight and chemicals to make images of algae for identification. Atkins was friends with early photography pioneers. Her book, “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions,” was first published in 1842, although it came out in different volumes, according to an article in New Scientist.

“Back in the day a plant stood still longer than a person,” Moore said, explaining why plants were such an early focus of photography. The cyanotype process allowed for Atkins to get direct images of plants for identification rather than making drawings.

At Ijams during the demonstration, a variety of leaves and plants lay on the table for participants to use, from wild plants like maple to spices like rosemary.

The Big Camera! is a nonprofit funded by the East Tennessee Foundation and leads other types of activities, too. Although it was not part of this workshop, The project also has a 10-x-6-foot camera obscura, which is another early device for capturing images, and a portable dark room.

“The Big Camera! is intended to share the magic of photography though making its principles hands-on, allowing photography to come alive in a new way for many who encounter it,” according to the group’s official website.

“There is no better way, perhaps, to understand a subject than by becoming fully immersed in it, and in this case that means, literally entering into a life sized camera!”

For more information on The Big Camera! and its upcoming events, go to its Facebook or Instagram pages.

(Editor's note: Because of an editing error, this post corrects the name of Donna Moore).

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