PROJECT 2: Building a Pinhole Camera

By Christine Munar (abg) and Kristin Ho (aai)


Project Overview

In this project, Kristin and I built a pinhole camera (also called the "camera obscura"). It is essentially a dark box with a pinhole on one face, and a screen on the opposite face. Light reflecting off an object is directed through the pinhole to the screen, and an inverted image of the object forms on the screen. In order to have the digital photos presented here, we attached a digital camera with a long exposure time and captured the image.

Building and Desigining the Camera

How we created the camera obscura.

We setup our camera obscura similar to the diagram on the 194 website. We placed our white printer paper on the long side of the shoe box and covered all other faces with black cardstock. Since our black cardstock was sturdy enough, we simply used square cutouts of the black cardstock to make our different pinholes. Any time we needed to switch a pinhole, we changed the cutout accordingly and slightly secured it with tape. On the right of the pinhole hole, we used a Canon G7X Mark II digital camera with a digital screen that allowed us to immediately see the interior of the camera obscura. In order to ensure no light entered in the hole that secured the camera, and without damaging the camera with tape, we wrapped the edge with a black pantyhose. We then secured the camera in place by wrapping string around the camera and box as a whole.

0.1 mm diameter

3 mm diameter

5 mm diameter

Resulting Images

Captured images using different pinhol sizes and analysis of them.

Scene 1: Watermelom on Patio

.1 mm

3 mm

5 mm

Scene 2: Outside the Window

0.1 mm

3 mm

5 mm

In general, the 3mm pinhole size produced the clearest images. Although in theory, the .1mm pinhole should produce the sharpest images as it only allows a “pencil of rays” through the aperture, our .1mm pinhole produced images that were too dark and occasionally had dark distortion covering part of the photo even after extending the exposure time. Perhaps this was due to a combination of having an imperfect pinhole (some fuzzies at the back of the cardstock) and not enough light. The 5mm pinhole images were generally a tad too bright/overexposed, although the blur level was not actually too different from that of the 3mm.


Additional Images

Kristin and Watermelon (3 mm)

Christine and Watermelon (5 mm)

The backyard patio (3 mm)

Self-portraits of Kristin and Christine

More Kristin!

Behind the Scenes

Makeshift tripod to take picture of scene 2 (outside the window).

Scene 1 (watermelon on patio) setup.

Christine holding digital camera button to set long exposure.

Bells and Whistles

Light Painting

Triangle

Circle

Circle + Line

70

Using our pinhole camera, we set the exposure for a long interval of time while using our phone flashlights to repeatedly make the same shape. Since we determined the 3mm pinhole size produced the best results,we used this diameter.