Project 2: Pinhole Camera

By Frank Huang (aar), Luke Zhang (aaq) and Alex Jing (acw)

I. Introduction

Pinhole camera works off the principle that light travels in straight lines. It consists of a light-proof box with a tiny hole on one side. In this project, we make our own pinhole camera.

Our pinhole camera

II. Making the camera

We made our camera with a paper box with two holes cut on one side. The circular hole below is for the digital camera to capture the image made by the pinhole, the hole above is fitted with pinholes of different sizes to produce images. The edges of the box were sealed with duct tape to prevent leaking of light

Two openings on one side

The interior is lined with black paper to absorb any light that leaks into the box not from the pinhole. The side opposite to the pinhole is lined with a white paper as our film

Black paper used to line the interior
White paper as the film for the image

III. Results and observation

In this project, we had three sizes pinhole, 1mm, 3mm, 5mm. Here are a presentation of our results. Note that based on the principle of pinhole camera, all images will be captured upside down, here they are flipped for better display


Somewhere on Channing, 3mm
Somewhere on Channing, 5mm
Somewhere on Channing, 1mm

Rails, 3mm
Rails, 5mm
Rails, 1mm

Another Rail, 3mm
Another Rail, 5mm
Another Rail, 1mm

All images were taken with the same image settings. We can observe that as pinhole size gets larger, the images get brighter. This is because there are more light entering into the box with a larger pinhole. However, the images also get more blurry, since larger pinhole size means that each point on the object could fall on more locations on the paper, hence the sharpness of the images decrease considerably.

IV. Other images taken on campus

I take these images with a pinhole of size 1mm. Instead of using the black box we made, I used a camera with lens removed and covering the sensor with the pinhole

Singing practice, 1mm
Sproul and campanile, 1mm
Golden Bear Cafe, 1mm
Another Sproul, 1mm

V. Bells and Whitsles

Since the principle behind the pinhole is so simple, we apply this to a room. Here is one image taken with a dark room as pinhole box using 1mm pinhole.We can see the curtain in the image.

Room pinhole