For 365 straight days and nights, light has crept through the pinhole, slowly building an exposure on a piece of photosensitive paper.

Ponder that.

A typical exposure with a digital SLR on a bright sunny day, depending on aperture and ISO, might last between 1/250th and 1/1000th of a second.

In Chrisman’s pinhole experiment, the “shutter” — there really isn’t one on a pinhole camera, just a piece of electrical tape or a removable cap, perhaps — has been open for 31,536,000 seconds, give or take a few.

On New Year’s Eve day, Chrisman trudged out to retrieve the camera and exposed paper inside.

“I’m thrilled with it,” Chrisman said Sunday. “It’s a very dreamy photo. This one has a soft and kind of foggy feel.”

Think of it as a time-lapse painting. The physical progress of the sun leaves a streak that shifts minutely each day. The daily on and off of building lights leaves only light, not dark. Once exposed, there is no way to undo it.

The camera, a simple black box, was mounted to the side of a rusty metal box next to a shipping beacon near the shipping canal. Chrisman used tape and a few bricks to “secure and position the camera for its long wait,” he said in an email exchange with the Star.

Chrisman, a 31-year-old freelance editorial and art photographer, put it there on Jan. 1, 2011, knowing a lot could go wrong. Mishaps could include the camera being stolen, which has happened in some of his earlier time-exposure experiments.

“The biggest difficulty,” he explained, “is trying to ensure the camera will be there when you return.

“As I’ve become more brazen with regard to installing them in more public or more populated areas, more and more cameras have gone missing. I mark down the dates to retrieve the cameras on a calendar; it is such a slow process that the best thing I can do is forget about the cameras so I don’t obsess about them.”

The nature of the exposure will likely result in a muddy look. There will be no shadows, no sun flares off windows. The cumulative effect of a moving light — that would be the sun and moon — will flatten the image.

The most intriguing aspect of the photo, said Chrisman, may be the “trails left by the sun as it moves through the sky both throughout the day and as the seasons change.”

Chrisman uses photosensitive paper in his cameras, as opposed to film, because it is less sensitive to light. A typical daylight exposure with a pinhole camera loaded with film is several seconds long, or less.

Even so, with the length of Chrisman’s exposures, the paper is extremely overexposed. There is no need to use chemicals to bring up the image. After so long, it is there on its own and visible to the naked eye.

“If I were to try to develop the paper in a traditional darkroom, the image would be lost,” said Chrisman.

Instead, he uses a scanner to capture the image from the paper, and in doing so, destroys the paper image itself. “The bright light of the scanner slowly erases the image, inch by inch, as it captures it.”

What took a year to make is gone in moments, but lives on in a digital form.

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“Time is always a major component in photography, but is usually dealt with in fractions of a second,” writes Chrisman, explaining his interest in lengthy exposures. “Exploring the limits of the medium is part of what drew me to attempting this photograph.

“These photos are a constant experiment, and with each test taking months or years, it is a very slow experiment.”

One that involves a bit of luck, as well.