194-26 Project 2

Building a Pinhole Camera

James Lin (abr) and Alex Dai (ace)

Project Description


For this project, we constructed a pinhole camera using a shoebox, black paper, and tape.


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Camera hole and slot for black paper aperture.

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Inside of box with black lining and white "film".

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Complete setup.

As you can see, we duct taped the edges of the box as they were leaking light.
We also used a jacket and towel to surround the box and camera hole respectively
in order to keep out as much light as possible. Below are the pictures we captured.


Aperture Comparisons


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Aperture: .1mm, Exposure: 30s

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Aperture: 3mm, Exposure: 15s

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Aperture: 5mm, Exposure: 15s


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Aperture: .1mm, Exposure: 30s

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Aperture: 3mm, Exposure: 20s

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Aperture: 5mm, Exposure: 15s


We can see that the 3mm aperture gives us the highest quality images.
Here are a couple more pictures taken with the 3mm.


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Since they have a smaller aperture, the 3mm pictures are clearer than the 5mm at the cost of needing more light/exposure. But why then did the .1mm pictures turn out so unrecognizable?

One possibility is that the aperture was so small that the light being let in was overshadowed by the ambient light leaking into the box. If that was the case then increasing the exposure would only give us a clearer picture of the paper, which seems to have been the case. It's also possible there were imperfections in the hole (like remaining strands) since it was difficult to make a good hole of that size.