Just fun or art? It’s a real tossup

Sun., April 9, 2006

Fran Henry Newhouse News Service

The basics

Here are the basics of camera tossing. For more detailed instruction, go to cameratoss. blogspot.com, the Web site of Ryan Gallagher, an expert in the technique.

•Get a cheap digital camera, and select an area with a light source.

•Set the shutter speed for a second or two, or use night mode, if it's easier to set.

•If you don't trust your ability to catch the camera as it falls, secure it to your wrist with a cord or pad the landing area.

•Hit the shutter just as you toss the camera into the air — a couple of feet will do. Toss with a flick of your wrist. Here's where a lightweight camera works best.

•Catch the camera, and look at your photo. Erase it if it's not interesting, and try again.

Picture this. You are at a lame party, but you can’t leave because it’s at your house.

We offer this solution to your problem: Grab your digital camera, set the shutter speed real slow – at one second or in night mode – and prepare to dazzle the crowd before it disperses out of boredom.

With a flourish, you will demonstrate the wondrous world of camera tossing, in which your digital camera takes interesting pictures more or less on its own.

Here’s what you’ll do at this hypothetical party that’s going south:

After you depress the shutter button, you toss your camera 2 or 3 feet into the air and catch it before it lands. It is crucial that you catch the camera or somehow cushion its landing.

While the camera is on its own, it will take a picture. And this is what you’ll show your guests, and maybe even let them try, too – at least the ones who still are able to catch moving objects.

Who thought of this? Lots of people, probably, but a 28-year-old Texan named Ryan Gallagher, a theatrical lighting specialist, put his camera-toss pictures on Flickr.com, a photo-sharing Web site. Word got around quickly, and Gallagher was offered a gallery show in Hamburg, Germany. He figures he first tossed his camera Aug. 20, and his exhibit opened in January.

And Gallagher was there, his first trip to Europe, subsidized in part by the online Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine.

“It was standing room only,” Gallagher said in a cell phone conversation.

Six of his 23 prints sold for about 200 euros each, or about $240.

Naturally someone groused that Gallagher had shot his pictures with a cheap digital, but that was the worst of the criticism, he said. Indeed, it was a cheap digital, a Vivitar with a cracked LCD, but it already was cracked when a friend gave it to him.

His show apparently was well received, because the gallery extended it another three weeks. Gallagher said an exhibit in Berlin is also in the planning stages, a show he’ll share with Ottmar Hoerl, a German artist who has made photographs with cameras hurled from a nine-story building.

While Gallagher is pleased that he sold some prints, money isn’t his main interest.

“I gave away my technique right away. If I had been interested in making money, I would have kept my technique to myself,” he said, then paused, “and it probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere.” He laughed.

“It would be nice if artists could make money doing art,” he said.

But are his pictures art?

“Tossing can only be considered art, although there’s a lot of application in graphic art,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of inquiries to use my images in graphic design.”