Pinhole cameras are one of the simplest cameras that you can make today. The basic idea behind the Pinhole camera originates from the Camera Obscura. A Camera Obscura (latin for "dark room") basically is composed of a dark enclosure, where one wall has a small pinhole that lets in only a very small amount of light. This pinhole restricts light in such a way that the image of any object in front of the pinhole is projected upside down and mirrored on the opposite wall. The pinhole extends this concept by trying to capture the light project onto the opposite wall using either Film or by using a digital camera.

The pinhole camera that we built does the latter - we project against the wall of our camera opposite the wall with the pinhole, point a DSLR camera at the wall, then snap a long exposure. For the first part of this writeup, we display the images that are taken using a standard pinhole camera with a single pinhole. We cycle through 3 different pinhole sizes demonstrating the effect of these sizes on the focus of the image. Then for the second part we explore several bells and whistles

Our basic pinhole camera required these materials:
• A cardboard box, about the size of a shoebox
• Black duct tape
• Black construction paper
• Aluminum foil
• White Cardstock

We also wanted to add the functionality to create anaglyph images, for which we had

• Velcro strips
• Anaglyph 3D glasses

One of the most important parts of a pinhole camera construction is light-proofing the box. In order to ensure we had no light leakage, we took a think cardboard box and sealed every edge and every corner of it with black duct tape. We also covered the insides of the box with black construction paper to reduce internal reflections, and used white paper as the screen for our images. Any left over patches were painted over using black acrylic paint. This was followed by two 5mmx5mm openings for apertures (we made two holes because we wanted to do anaglyph imaging). We also cut out a hole for the camera, and liberally used duct tape to make everything light-proof and snug.

Next part of the construction process were the pinholes. We wanted to be able to easily adjust aperture position and size, so we designed a system of swappable apertures. The pinhole is not located on the box itself, but rather on a swappable strip of paper that is held tightly in place using slots made from cardboard. All we need to do in order to change our aperture size or shape is to slide the desired aperture strips into their position. We can also move the aperture a little bit to adjust the image location for best results.

An aperture strip is essentially a strip of thick white index paper with aluminium foil stuck on one side of it. We found this to be more effective at blocking light than using thicker paper. The aluminium foil also lets us make our pinholes more precise as compared to paper, which creates a lot more debris when pierced with a needle. We used a detachable strip of velcro to seal the hole that we didn't need while taking normal images. The structural integrity of this whole assembly relies heavily on duct tape.

For the results, we had to flip the image vertically. This is because the pinhole camera produces a vertically mirrored image due to the function of the projection

We wanted to evaluate the effect of a varying pinhole size on the quality of the image produced by the camera. We did this comparison with two different locations.

As you can see, a smaller pinhole produces the sharpest images, while 5mm produces the most blurry images. In the second set of pictures, you can also see the change in brightness that occurs with the larger pinholes. Larger pinholes let in more light, causing the resultant image to be much brighter when compared to images that have smaller pinholes, but the same photographic parameters.

The following four photos were taken with the 1mm filter because it produced the sharpest results.

While taking these photos, we came across several failure cases that resulted either from mistakes in taking the photos or simply located in areas with low-light conditions that were not suited for taking photos.

We decided to dedicate our series of light painted photos to all things Cal.

As an extension of the pinhole camera, we decided to add the functionality to take stereoscopic images. To fascilitate this end, we added a second aperture to our box design (immediately vertical to the original pinhole) and used red and cyan filters to take pictures.