Slab Glass

This is the first camera of my memory, about the size of a box of animal crackers. The flash was four-sided, rotated after each shot and then discarded. In the mosaic, I made the flash out of scraps of slab glass inherited from an odd-jobs kind of guy who haunted the neighborhood around my shop. He would frequently have broken tools for sale, cheaply. One day he had a bucket of chips and chunks of thick glass. I’ve had them kicking around for years.

I used this light blue glass for the center of the flash. Oddly enough, held up to the sunlight, the blue glass glows orange. I believe this is an example of how nanoparticles have been used to color glass since the Middle Ages. At least, that’s what I recall from an old episode of NOVA.