Meditations on the Rideau – Field Note 002
[ Pinhole photograph, ONDU 4×5 camera, Ilford Delta 100 film, 60-second exposure ]
By any technical measure this photograph should have gone straight to the reject pile: soft focus, low contrast, and, in particular, uneven development. I’m not entirely sure what happened along the right side of the image, and it’s the kind of work I would normally never show.
And yet I keep returning to it. The mood feels thick with memory, a fold in time where the past and present briefly coexist.
This is Watson’s Mill in Manotick, built in 1860 on the Rideau Canal as a flour mill. Photographing it with a wooden pinhole camera and a long exposure on large format film felt like a reach across time, using a process that would have been familiar in its earliest years. The result feels like it could have been made at any point in the last 165 years.
So is this a creative failure? I don’t think so. It may not be the picture I intended, but it tells a story of the mill in a way high resolution and modern digital clarity never could. Sometimes the camera leads us exactly where we need to go. A happy accident.
Scott Murphy – Photographer 
It’s beautiful about photography and especially the film photography sometimes we are planning something but finally getting something else. And these incidents are beautiful and forcing me to try making these by demand 😉
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