For the past two months I have been working on the Earth to Earth project. This is part of my Arts Council of Wales research grant. This time I decided to document the weathering of the Jar using Time Lapse Photography. At first I thought this would be straight forward but the more I thought about it the more involved the project became. Firstly I needed a way to house the camera that was weather proof. I ended up modifying an electrical junction box. I knew from the experience of past attempts that the Jar would last anything from a few days to two weeks so I needed to power the camera for a long period. I used a 12v battery and a DC to DC power converter. Just getting this far took a lot of research and technical knowledge for which I am very grateful to Colin Gregory.

The Jar will be photographed day and night every 33 seconds until it has weathered away. Each shot will become a single frame in a film with 25 frames per second. The camera will take 109 pictures and hour which will translate to just over 4 seconds of film. For this I had to work out all the best camera settings, the interval between shots, the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO and so on. More technical research and long conversations with my brother Greg. As a teenager I had a manual SLR camera and that foundation in understanding cameras really paid off.

Last week I did a trial run, at first I thought it wouldn’t be, but I soon realised despite all my research I still had a lot to get right. The results however from the trial are very encouraging and exciting. The changing weather, the stars at night, moon light, sun rise, rain all captured on camera.

This project has been a journey in its self and I have been contemplating for a long time how best to illustrate it. I am hopeful that this will be an interesting depiction. I have never exhibited this project in any capacity and just recently I have had interest in it from a number of places. Most excitingly I have been asked to be part of a major exhibition at Ruthin Craft Centre in January and they are particularly interested in exhibiting this piece. Lets hope it goes well.