Washington ? Take a 10-gallon trash can, punch a pinhole in its side, tape a sheet of photographic paper inside, seal the can, set it down in front of a scene.

And wait.

Wait maybe six minutes, maybe 40 minutes, maybe four days depends mostly on the amount of natural light. That’s how Bruce McKaig shot 27 photos now on display at Washington’s Kathleen Ewing Gallery.

The pieces in the show all depict local outdoor scenes the Capitol and the Jefferson Memorial from a distance, and the statues in front of the Library of Congress.

McKaig, 43, has been a photographer for more than 15 years, but Kathleen Ewing, who heads the gallery, said even children can get results with a coffee can instead of the garbage can.

McKaig, a native North Carolinian, now lives in Washington and teaches courses sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates, an offshoot of the Smithsonian Institution, and elsewhere around Washington.

McKaig bought his galvanized steel trash can for $12.99.

How does one stabilize a cylindrical can for a two-hour exposure?

This untitled Bruce McKaig pinhole photo of the Library of Congress fountain in Washington is one of 27 silver gelatin prints made using a trash can.

“I just stuff my sweater under it or pick up sticks and stones,” McKaig said.

The pinhole was more complicated. First he drilled a hole through the steel, a small hole but bigger than he wanted. Then he fixed a thin piece of aluminum over the hole and penetrated it with a needle.

“Just the point of the needle, until you could see the light come through,” he said. He then covers the hole with a piece of tape, which he pulls off when he’s ready to start shooting.

The principle, he said, goes back to the ancient Egyptians. They didn’t have photographic paper but they noticed that light coming through a small hole in the wall of a dark room produced an image on the opposite wall upside down.

European artists used the device centuries ago to get an outline for a picture. They gave the process a Latin name: camera obscura dark room.

In the 1830s the French inventor Louis Daguerre was the first to fix an image from a camera obscura in effect, a pinhole camera onto a copper plate coated with silver.

McKaig likes unusual effects in photography with a minimum of technology. He made his first pinhole camera a decade ago when he was living in the mountains of Guatemala.