A university student may have accidentally captured the longest exposure photograph ever taken, with an 8-year shot of the movement of the sun – and it was captured on a very unorthodox camera.
Forgetful students and lost cans of beer usually go hand in hand, and in this case they also went in hand with a student working on her master's degree. Regina Valkenborgh, who was studying for her MA in Fine Art at the United Kingdom's University of Hertfordshire, created a pinhole camera using a beer can in 2012 at the institution's Bayfordbury Observatory.
Her goal was to record images without employing modern technology, so she constructed a camera by lining a beer can with photographic paper to make it suitable for pinhole photography.
She placed the camera on one of the Observatory telescopes – where it sat forgotten until September this year, when it was removed by technical officer David Campbell, having shot a continuous long exposure for eight years and one month.
During that time it captured 2,953 arced trails of the sun, along with the building of an atmospheric gantry (visible from the center to the right of the photograph), which was constructed halfway through the exposure. The image also depicts the dome of Bayfordbury’s oldest telescope (to the left).
"It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched, to be saved by David after all these years," said Valkenborgh, who is now a photography technician at Barnet and Southgate College in the UK.
"I had tried this technique a couple of times at the Observatory before, but the photographs were often ruined by moisture and the photographic paper curled up. I hadn’t intended to capture an exposure for this length of time and to my surprise, it had survived. It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence."
According to the University, the current record for longest exposure photograph ever taken is believed to be held by a German artist, Michael Wesely, which captured an exposure over four years and eight months. While it seems unlikely that validated dates exist to make her an official record holder, Valkenborgh will surely stand as the new unofficial champion.
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