Photo Video Diaries: Hermione

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Well the photography challenge, me and Mikey B to take a photograph using silver extracted from rocks and nitric acid extracted from horse manure. That was the basic task that we both had to do on day one. So I began with a trek up to an abandoned silver mine, which was a lovely, lovely setting, and basically going through the tailings, the waste that the miners had left behind to find bits of this mineral called tetrahedrite which has a high silver content in this area.

Tetrahedrite has a very variable silver content because essentially it’s a copper antimony mineral. But silver sometimes, and at the silver mine it was pretty likely that they were mining the silver from the tetrahedrite. Anyway, so I managed to find a few bits and bring them back to the mill, and that was really a whole day’s work.

Day two. Day two was really assessing what tetrahedrite I had and crushing it down into a fine powder so that we could maximise any chemical reaction to extract the silver and, you know, another crushing chipping away but we got some nice fine milled tetrahedrite. But again, at that stage I really didn’t know what the silver content was. I was relying on Mikey B to make nitric acid from horse manure, which incredibly he did. And then just on the morning on day two we combined the nitric acid with the tetrahedrite and it reacted and we got copper nitrate visible because it gives a lovely blue colour.

So we still hadn’t tested for silver but at least the nitric acid was working, and I started work on building a camera. And I don’t know who’s idea it was, but it was a great idea to use the trunk as a kind of camera/darkroom set up. So I just went about drilling some holes so I could get my hands in and start manipulating and essentially we just ran out of time. So it was all left to day three, was a really epic day.

The beginning of day three began with some serious chemistry and Mikey B showing that the tetrahedrite actually contained silver, and that we could make silver chloride by adding salt. And we did, oh it was just brilliant. Silver chloride is actually a white precipitate so we made a lot of this just on a filter paper, put it out in the sun with a washer on top of it and a little rubber bung and the sunlight reacts and the silver chloride basically releases silver atoms, so what’s exposed to the sun goes this beautiful purple colour, that sort of silver tarnished colour. And when we lifted up the rubber bung it just stayed white, so we’d proved our photosensitivity. And the rest of the morning we spent finishing off the camera and working out the manoeuvres to get the silver chloride, silver nitrate, sorry, in a solution on to our paper and to load up the camera and do some tests with exposure.

And we got there in the end. Like it wasn’t straightforward. I mean I don’t know what you have in mind when you think we’ll do some photography trials. This is really, really basic photography. But what we did manage to get was this beautiful silhouette of the roof of the mill against the sky, and I just, that moment was just so brilliant with Mike there opening up the trunk and seeing the picture. Now unfortunately it was a bit downhill from there because we couldn’t fix the photo effectively, we didn’t have time to dry it so we just wrapped it up in aluminium foil to take for the end of the challenge, which is when I got to have a glimpse of what Ellen and Jonathan had been doing for three days, which were these incredible hydrogen balloons and fuses incredible.

So we had great fun at the end; Kate was on a horse, we released the picture up and down this field it was brilliant but unfortunately then when we revealed the photo it hadn’t fixed properly and also there’d been some kind of strange chemical reaction with the aluminium foil, we just shouldn’t have wrapped it in foil, so it had really degraded and you couldn’t really see it. But I still feel that the challenge was a success because we did get there in the end and it was just a tough one, but really good in the end.