© Susan Burnstine

A Fine-Art photographer makes cameras to create her black-and-white images.

by Julie Gallagher

After tinkered-with toy cameras failed to produce her desired effect, fine-art photographer Susan Burnstine culled camera parts from a different toy treasure. “I was playing with a friend’s son and his vintage science kit, and I saw this really interesting plastic magnifying glass. I looked through it and thought, wow this is interesting,” she recounts. “I knew I could make a lens out of it, so I stole it.”

Visits to the hardware store for other homemade camera ingredients—rubber, plastic, garbage bags, cinema foil and Duco cement—have since become commonplace. “My main inspiration for creating my own cameras and lenses was to have a look that no one else had,” says Burnstine.

Burnstine, who always has at least two of her creative cameras on hand, controls light by stacking filters and achieves a hazy effect by controlling the cameras’ make shift bellows with her hands. “I’m not a rocket scientist. I just make these cameras, and they all have one f-stop with different shutter speeds and blur abilities,” she explains. “If I’m in a low-light situation or a very bright situation I’ll grab a particular camera that suits whatever the situation needs.”

IN PASSAGE

© Susan Burnstine

Trial and error: Burnstine captured this image on an elevated walkway in London’s Paddington Station.

Shot from an elevated walkway in London’s Paddington Station just a week before the 2005 London blast, Burnstine’s “In Passage” was the first image taken with one of her homemade inventions that she deems a success. “After I took this one [image], I was convinced that it was the best thing that I’d ever do, and I wouldn’t be able to take another like it again,” she says. “It was the first thing that got me stumbling onto this whole style.”

Burnstine spent two months using plastic, rubber, vintage toy camera parts, photo tape, a plastic magnifying glass, Duco cement, thin sheet metal, bolts, cardboard and bendable wire to construct the camera that captured this image. “The idea was to make a toy camera with bellows so that I could control the blur in a different manner than a conventional plastic toy camera, not a conventional [SLR] camera,” she explains.

Since Burnstine’s homemade camera had a range finder rather than a single-lens reflex, she had to guess the distance, blur and depth of field based on preliminary test shots she’d taken from various distances and angles during months of practice before arriving in London to shoot the final image. The process involved shooting and developing each test shot in order to decide on how to improve upon it for the subsequent shots. Burnstine also used a yellow filter and manually manipulated the lens to achieve the blurred effect. “I couldn’t see what the exact outcome would be,” she admits. But after developing the shot, she was pleasantly surprised.

“The blur just mesmerized me,” she says. “I took about seven images in a row and didn’t write down what I did. This is a lesson to all photographers: Write down what you do or it’ll take you four more months to reteach yourself,” she advises.

GLIDE

© Susan Burnstine

Water view: Burnstine captured this image by twisting the lens in multiple ways on her homemade camera.

A cold, rainy day at Venice Beach was the unlikely playground for the four little girls that Burnstine observed for close to an hour as the sun began to set. She stumbled onto the scene after walking from a class instructed by photographer Keith Carter, who inspired her initial interest in shooting with toy cameras. “[The girls] were just running and running and running. I sat and watched them and took about ten frames,” recounts Burnstine, who again used a yellow filter to increase the contrast in the late-afternoon sky.

While Burnstine chose to use a different homemade camera for this image, the same materials were used for the camera’s month-long construction. However, unlike the homemade camera Burnstine used for “In Passage,” which had two shutter speeds, the new device had a telephoto lens and three shutter speeds. Burnstine explains that as she became more skilled at the camera-making process, she was able to create additional and more accurate shutter speeds with each new design. “Making my own cameras was a great educational and inspirational lesson, since it enabled me to learn more about photography than anything I had ever attempted before,” she says.

Burnstine adds that the dexterity of her hands was a key element in capturing this particular image. Burnstine controls the blur in her photos by manually manipulating the homemade bellows on the lens, which are crafted from rubber, tape, garbage bags and other odds and ends she finds around her house. Initially the bellow manipulation process was one of trial and error, but after four months of non-stop testing, Burnstine mastered the process. “I wanted to blur the pier and the water, so I had to squish the lens in a way that was very complex,” she relates. “It was like playing Twister with my hands. My one hand was literally around the other so that I could get that one little part sharp and the rest in a blur.”

GRASP

© Susan Burnstine

Motion blur: One of a series of images from Burstine’s latest collection, “Between.”

Burnstine chose to focus on her subject’s hands, rather than the face, as the conduit of emotion for, “Grasp,” which is part of her new series, Between, inspired by the reactions of people post 9/11. “It intrigued me that for every set of eyes that experience an event, there are unlimited perceptions,” she explains. “One man’s happiness is another’s tragedy. I didn’t want the subject’s face to be shown, yet I wanted her emotion to show through.”

CAMERAS: Medium-format homemade cameras with homemade lenses molded from plastic. Many are consistent in terms of shape, size and distortion to achieve the same style/blur from each camera. Nikon F100 Nikon N80 Nikon D70 COMPUTER: Macintosh iMac G5 SCANNER: Epson 4990 SOFTWARE: Adobe Photoshop CS PRINTER: Epson 3800

The Between series will be part of a solo show in Seattle’s Wall Space Gallery this March, and this image, along with others from the show, were exhibited at the Susan Spiritus Gallery last January during Photo LA.

Burnstine used backlighting to achieve the shot’s ethereal glow and chose to use yet another one of her homemade cameras because it had the slowest possible shutter speed. She wanted to capture motion in a three-dimensional manner while shooting through water, and because she didn’t have a 3X filter, she stacked a 2X and 1X filter to take the shot. “Shooting with these cameras isn’t like using a nice Nikon,” she explains, comparing her homemade cameras to the Nikon N80 and D70 she typically uses for her commercial shoots. “If I want to shoot close-up, I have to stack these little diopters.”

Because of the falling water, Burnstine also struggled to keep her hands and lens dry so that they wouldn’t slip as she attempted to manually achieve the desired haze. “It’s very hard having stacked lenses and keeping the focus and the blur as you want it,” she explains. As the tile of her image may suggest, “It’s all about dexterity and strength in your fingers,” she says.