Orlando has been employed in the photography industry for over 40 years and is currently working with the photography department at Hornsby TAFE.
Ten years ago, he built a pin-hole camera as a teaching aid. As many photographers know, a pinhole camera is just a box with a small hole on one side that allows light to be projected onto the inside wall.
As a tinkerer at heart, he began experimenting with building different cameras with various ad-hoc lenses, starting with cardboard prototypes before advancing to more sophisticated timber models. Eventually, he started crafting cameras from trash cans and random discarded materials.
He has now built several of these cameras from various pieces of unloved junk – including discarded computer towers, bamboo sticks, fuel cans, polystyrene fruit boxes and even crutches. The idea of making cameras from trash stems from his environmentally focused arts practice, which like a number of other artists, is based on examining the environmental impact of how our culture readily discards useful objects, or technology which is just slightly 'out of date'.
To create a camera, he constructs a light-tight housing designed to hold a piece of A3 or A4 translucent tracing paper – to which the image will be projected onto. This paper can be swapped out to alter density or texture. At the rear of this housing is a mount for attaching either a digital camera or a phone camera to capture the resulting image on the paper. On the front of the camera, he improvises a housing / bracket to hold a close-up lens equivalent to 250-500mm to focus the light onto the translucent paper. He also experiments with stacking different lenses to achieve different effects.
Although close-up lenses are not really designed for this purpose, they do work in this situation, though often the image sharpness is only in the middle of the image, while the edges fall away to what could be seen as beautiful bokeh. This effect is something that you can't just buy off the shelf from your local camera store.
A number of images he has created also incorporate the surrounding metal walls of the can, which give an almost 3D effect.
Other interesting technical aspects include the fact that the light projected onto the tracing paper loses about six stops by the time it travels through the lenses and onto the paper. Additionally, the Trash Cam's aperture is approximately f/4.0.
At the rear of the Trash Cam is a Nikon Z 7 with either a 24-70mm or 12-24mm lens. A black material hood is used to cover the camera and block out extraneous light. For a shot taken in full daylight, the exposure settings on the Nikon Z 7 would typically be 1/30s at f/8.0 with ISO 100.
When asked if he would consider shooting sport with a Trash Cam – Orlando just laughed...
"I love these self-built cameras because they are a fantastic way to understand optics, image formation, and the history of photography. Additionally, their large size is reminiscent of the clunky, unwieldy cameras from the late 1800s. The soft and dreamy Pictorialist-like images they produce are exceptional," Orlando explains.
His images have received much recognition from a number of competitions and awards such as:
• 2023 Remagine Environmental Art Competition: Local Artist Award – Photograph taken on Trash Cam 1
• 2023 Northern Beaches Environmental Art Prize: Honourable Mention – Trash Cam 1
• 2024 CLIP Award – Semi-Finalist – my photos incorporated in slideshow in gallery
• 2024 Canberra Contemporary Photographic Prize: Photograph Taken on Trash Cam 1
• 2024 Northern Beaches Environmental Art Prize – Finalist (results TBA)
• 2024 focal Point Photographic Prize – Finalist (results TBA)
• 2024 Mullins Contemporary Photographic Prize – Finalist (results TBA)
So not only do these Trash Cams create interesting images, but they are also works of art in themselves, often resembling something you'd see in a William Gibson cyberpunk film or as a sculpture in an offbeat art gallery.
You can see more of Orlando's work on his Instagram page, or read more about his career on his website.
