It takes cameras 1,000 years to take a photo

The "Millennium Camera" project was developed by philosopher Jonathan Keats at the Arizona College of Fine Arts and a research team at the Desert Laboratory to take the world's slowest photograph.

Scientists placed a camera with a simple design on top of Tumamoc hill, Tucson, Arizona, to record changes in the surrounding landscape with a record long exposure time, up to 1,000 years.

It takes cameras 1,000 years to take a photo Picture 1

The key to designing a camera that can last 1,000 years is simplicity. The Millennium Camera has a classic pinhole camera design consisting of a copper cylinder with a thin 24-karat gold plate at one end and a small hole. Light passes through that hole and shines onto the light-sensitive surface inside the camera, which is covered with many thin layers of an oil paint pigment called rose madder.

The Millennium Camera is mounted on a steel pole, near a bench along a walking path on Tumamoc Hill with a sign explaining the purpose of the project.

 Over the course of 1,000 years, the light-sensitive surface inside the camera will be gradually affected by light reflected from the landscape. The pigments will fade to varying degrees slowly during controlled exposure.

Darker areas will fade more slowly than bright areas. Going forward, the photo will be a unique record of what changed and what remained the same during this time period.

So what will the photo look like? Keats said, for example, after 500 years all the houses will be demolished, then the mountains will become airy, sharp and dark, and the houses will look like ghosts.

Keats plans to install additional Millennium Cameras in the region facing many different directions and in several places around the world such as Griffith Park in Los Angeles, USA, the Austrian Alps and locations in China.

David Pac

Update 16 January 2024