When I was a small boy, I lived in the South West of England, and like most small boys who were lucky to live on the edge of a small country town, I played in the fields, climbed trees, made "bridges" over (actually in) the local stream, and looked for pirates at the local pond.
I also used to "help" Farmer Steele harvest his mowing grass.
As a result, before the days of Health and Safety Officers, I almost stepped on a harmless but large Grass Snake (which has given me a phobia for the last sixty-odd years), I fell out of trees, I got "shoefulls" of stream water, and several times I fell into the pond. Mr Steele taught me swearing, and I discovered quote marks. "Mr Steele said that he wanted the bloody wire on the bloody fence not across the bloody field" But I didn't say that, Mum, Mr Steele did!
By play and adventures, I got to know about the natural history of the area. Yes, I took birds eggs, and fried small fish out of the stream (disgusting) and a gypsy boy showed me how to cook a hedgehog, which was surprisingly good. Thanks to Farmer Steele, I also learnt about flowers. I can hear him now, saying to me, "Now that's not a bloody buttercup 'cos it loves damp ground. It's a bloody celandine"
And then a catastrophe occurred. My father's job took us all to Bournemouth, a seaside resort almost forty times bigger than Tewkesbury. At the start, I knew no-one, I felt homesick, there was no Farmer bloody Steele to verbally perfume the countryside.
So, I used to go for walks by myself, but there were few trees, no streams or ponds, and a large river, the Stour, which was way too wide to even think about bridging it using branches of willow. I wandered along the path through the mowing grass, and picked dozens of wild flowers, many of which I already knew, and some that were knew to me. (Incidentally, it is now illegal to pick wild flowers in the UK!). Besides buttercups and celandines, there were purple loosestrife and St John's wort, Ladies' slippers, Jack-go-to-bed at noon, parson-in-the pulpit, vipers' bugloss, butterfly orchids and lesser spotted orchids, dog roses in the hedge, hips and haws and elderflowers, and many many more, with butterflies to feed on this rich flora.
I used to pick a bunch and take them home, where I carefully put them between folded blotting paper, arranged the "parcel" inside the pages of a book which was weighted down with a brick or two. After a week, I would reverse the process, and put the pressed flowers somewhere safe. I still have those flowers, almost sixty years later. Their rich colours have faded, but I see them as they were. I can't name many of them anymore, but I'm amazed that they all came from two adjoining fields. It was before the days of monoculture, when the milk that we drank changed subtly through the year as the cows ate different plants.
But enough of this old man's reverie into his boyhood. Let's talk photography. How can you get recognisable pictures of objects without using a camera. There are probably several ways using digital means, but I have only tried one. If you have a scanner, and flat objects, you have potential pictures (but please, PLEASE, don't sit on a photocopier and press the button!) The pressed wild flowers gave me the clue, and my first picture was of a piece of flat parsley.
Later, I graduated to a cockatoo feather.
It is advisable not to try and use a whole cockatoo, as you will experience difficulty in flattening it sufficiently, and you may not get the photo that you wanted.
If only I had been able to use a scanner on all those wild flowers. They would never have faded in my pictures. Of course, anything flat can be scanned, and the second picture is of airline luggage labels that I have acquired over the years.
You will notice that almost without exception, I only have to travel with an airline for it to close or be taken over. Ansett Australia; Pan American; Canadian Pacific International. All gone now, like many of the wild flowers of long ago, which possibly have only been scanned by a few.
If you have a "wet lab" or dark room, the possibilities of image making without a camera increase considerably.
Such as, if you have a negative, a fun thing to try is leaf photography. For this you will need a live tree. Chlorophyll is the stuff that makes leaves green. When the sun shines, the chlorophyll breaks down the starch into sugars which feed the plant. So, if you fix a 35 mm negative to a growing leaf, and leave it outside in the sunshine for several days, the clear part of the negative allows the sunshine to get the chlorophyll in the leaf to convert the starch into sugar. The black part of the negative blocks the sunshine so that the chlorophyll can't convert starch into sugar. Now comes the interesting part. You put the leaf into alcohol. ALCOHOL IS INFLAMMABLE, but fortunately it boils at 79C. Water boils at 100C. Therefore if you heat the water to boiling and then add the alcohol and leaf in a smaller container, the chlorophyll gets leached out of the leaf, so that you end up with a white leaf. Tincture of iodine (if weak enough) makes the areas where the starch is to turn blackish blue. There is no colour change where the sun and the chlorophyll has turned the starch into sugar.
Another method, which personally I have not tried, is to sandwich a flat object between two sheets of glass and some photographic paper. After a few days in the sun, the paper can be developed and an image produced.
And finally a footnote on the very first cameras. They were made of wood and had an oiled paper screen. They were used by artists. Many famous artists used them, including the French Impressionists, who painted "en plein air" (outside in the fresh air!) We call them pinhole cameras, and they have a virtually complete depth of field. The easiest way to make one is to get a can with a removable lid, like an old golden syrup tin. Paint the inside matt black. Drill the thinnest hole possible in the centre of the base of the tin. Place a piece of greaseproof paper over the open end, and move the camera (probably on a tripod) until you can see the desired scene. Then carefully remove the apparatus, go into a darkroom, and jam a sheet of film between the lid and the can. Choose a suitable exposure (a couple of hours, perhaps), and then take everything into a darkroom and process as normal. OK, you have used a camera, but you have taken a photograph in the same way that the very first pictures were taken, and if you are lucky, you may end up with a photo that looks as though it was taken in the 1840s!
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