Talk about long-exposure photography: photographer Jonathon Keats has set up four cameras around Lake Tahoe for 1,000-year-long exposures -- that's a shutter speed of 31,536,000,000 seconds. He has also booked space for an exhibition of the resulting photos in the year 3018.
Jonathon Keats wants to set a world record in photography that he won't live long enough to see. Nor will his children, or his children's children for many generations. It's a project that won't complete for a millennium.
Keats plans to capture the world's slowest photograph, a 1,000-year-long exposure of the city of Tempe, Arizona, that will be finished in the Spring of 3015.
Long exposure photographs are usually measured in seconds or minutes. Use solargraphy, and you might measure in months or years. The longest we've heard of so far are photos spanning decades.
Well, those exposure times are relatively short compared to Jonathon Keats's "century cameras": they're specially designed cameras that will take 100-year-long exposures!
The origin of photography was artistic incompetence. On his honeymoon in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to sketch the Italian countryside. He was assisted by a camera lucida, a device that projected the landscape onto a sheet of paper, but his untutored hand couldn’t follow the contours. So he conjured a means to record scenery chemically. He dubbed it “the art of photogenic drawing”, and in the 1840s popularized his invention with a book called The Pencil of Nature.