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.
Resulting Images
Captured images using different pinhol sizes and analysis of them.
Scene 1: Watermelom on Patio
Scene 2: Outside the Window
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
Self-portraits of Kristin and Christine
More Kristin!
Behind the Scenes
Bells and Whistles
Light Painting
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.