Friday, April 30, 2010

The Great Picture


The nonprofit Legacy Project in Orange County produces documentation of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. The project began in April 2002 and will continue to document the conversion of the air station into the Orange County Great Park, which will include housing and a large urban park. The Legacy Project uses photographs, video and oral histories to “provide a unique record of an extraordinary development in the history of southern California.”

In the summer of 2006, six Legacy Project photographers presented the world’s largest photograph, which took nine months to create. The picture was produced with the world’s largest camera, a shuttered F-18 fighter plane hangar, also created by the artists. The camera is about 44 feet high, 79 feet deep and 161 feet wide with an aperture size of a one-quarter-inch pinhole fifteen feet above the ground. It took two months to transform the hangar into a camera.

The 3,375-square-foot photograph (3 stories high by 11 stories long) is of the El Toro control tower, twin runways and the future Orange County Great Park. The San Joaquin Hills and the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park are in the background. The exposure took 35 minutes beginning at 11:30 a.m. on July 8, 2006. A custom Olympic-sized tray was used for developing the photograph.

Check out the Legacy Project’s site for more information.

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