Newsletter #178 - The Chicken Camera
A summer of chicken self-portraits
In the summer of 2022, I collaborated with my friend Jacob Bijani on a project we called chicken.photos.
Together we created a camera that was automatically triggered to make a photograph every time a chicken passed by a sensor, so they could make chicken self-portraits.
The system consisted of a Canon 7D, a speed flash, a Raspberry Pi, and an ultrasonic motion trigger.
The way it worked was whenever a chicken passed in front of the motion sensor, the Pi snapped a photo on the camera, which in turn fired the speed flash. Once the photo was taken, the Pi downloaded the photo from the camera’s SD card and uploaded it to our website. Select photographs were then minted as NFTs (remember those?).
We used the gphoto2 library to interact with the camera and CircuitPython for the firmware on the Pi.
We constructed a waterproof housing to protect all the gear and used custom-designed PCBs for power and signal routing between the components.
My role was to act as an assistant in the process, ensuring that the camera was functioning daily throughout the summer and that the models were fed and well taken care of.
Jacob remotely monitored the technical back-end, troubleshooting any problems or errors we encountered throughout the project.
This is just a brief description. If you want some more detail, Dean Peterson made a great video that helped to explain how this all worked.
The other day I was going through the photographs and I was amazed at how good some of the pictures were.
Looking back at these photographs, I was struck by how they capture something so uniquely chicken - the way these birds move with purpose yet seem completely random, how they interact with each other, and their moments of perfect stillness interrupted by sudden bursts of activity.
What made this project special wasn't just the technology (though that was cool), but the intersection of randomness and intention.
We set up the parameters - the camera height, angle, focus, and trigger sensitivity - but from there, it was all up to the chickens.
They each had their own personality, and it showed through in the images.
Marcel, always aware of the camera, seemed to strut past it intentionally.
The baby silkies could barely sit still - it was a miracle whenever we got a shot that worked.
I might have helped set this one up.
The Brahmas tended to trigger multiple shots as they moved slowly and deliberately.
The chicken cam also captured non-chicken animals, like the resident deer and squirrels.
It functioned well at night, too, occasionally getting photos of nocturnal visitors.
In total, the system captured over 6,500 photographs that summer. Some were mundane, some were out of focus, and some were accidentally perfect compositions that made me a little jealous.
By the end of the summer, I found myself thinking differently about both photography and my chickens. There's something profound about surrendering creative control to a combination of technology and animal behavior.
It reminded me that sometimes the best thing we can do as artists is simply create the conditions for interesting things to happen and then just get out of the way.
All in all it was an incredibly fun and rewarding project on many levels, but that summer was also really exhausting. It's hard to explain what it feels like to have your animals become your collaborators and primary form of employment. Summer Emerald, also known as Salesforce Child, made a video that perfectly expresses what it felt like:
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Kristen Neufeld’s dog cannot be trusted with a camera or a Pi.
Zach Vitale is more of a fan of Marcel’s large format work.
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Love it - reminds me of Stephen Gill's The Pillar
This is brilliant