Project 2: Building a Pinhole Camera

Jerry Chen - adr

Kevin Lin - aak

Joyce Luong - acs

About

How many UC Berkeley CS TAs does it take to build a pinhole camera given instructions to construct a pinhole camera with a digital camera, cardboard box, black/white paper, scissors, and far too much tape?

Approach

  1. Collect cardboard box.
  2. Cover interior with black paper.
  3. Cut holes for camera lens (snug) and for the pinhole (about 1 cm diameter).
  4. Create three smaller pinholes (0.1mm, 3mm, 5mm) on paper slides that can be easily switched over the 1cm pinhole.
  5. Apply tape liberally to edges, corners, and around the camera to keep light out. (Optional: tape camera to box to keep it attached)
  6. Take long-exposure pictures with a 30 second exposure time.
  7. Invert final images upside down.
  8. ???
  9. Profit!

The Camera

Scene 1: East Asian Library

As you can see, we had pretty good results with the 3mm pinhole. Unfortunately, the 0.1mm and 5mm pinholes did not lead to as good results. This is likely because the 5mm pinhole let in too much light (leading to blurry results). We had to readjust the camera before we took the 0.1mm picture. It had a lot of blue, likely because we did not put enough layers on the blue tape so it showed through.

0.1mm

3mm

5mm

Scene 2: Doe Library

Unfortunately, we did not achieve better results for our second scene. After multiple retapings and some amount of frustration, we were not able to achieve results similar to our 3mm East Asian Library picture. Nonetheless, please take a look at our results.

0.1mm

3mm

5mm

Selfies

Light Painting

These pictures were taken with a 30s exposure time and with a cell phone acting as the illuminant.

The Team