Concomitant | Whiteness connection Occurring concurrently One accompanies another |
H
ere is my first “Zone Plate” image. Unlike glass lenses, which use refraction to focus light, zone plate optics use diffraction to bend light. Consisting of a series of transparent and opaque concentric rings, a zone plate is constructed to work at a specific focal length. Visualize a zone plate as a pinhole with a border, surrounded by another larger pinhole with a border, which is also surrounded by yet another larger pinhole, and so on. It looks like a subminiature bull's-eye target. Aesthetically and creatively, zone plate photography is an area that is still relatively unexplored.
“I have been photographing out there [the American West ] for eleven years and I have found that I could go back to all the same places I had worked before with a pinhole. It was as if I was photographing in a completely different world. It seems almost as if the pinhole camera takes you beneath the surface of reality as we know it into another dimension, another place.....” - Douglas Frank
