CS 194 Project 2

In this project, we are tasked with building a camera obscura, which is essentially a black box with a pinhole that lets light shine onto a screen on the opposite side of the box. We put a DSLR through a hole on the same side as the pinhole and set it to long exposure to capture the image reflecting off of the screen. The structure of our camera is illustrated in the diagram below:

.1mm Pinhole

Roof

McCone Hall

3mm Pinhole

Roof

McCone Hall

5mm Pinhole

Roof

McCone Hall

Analysis

5mm came out blurry and overexposed because the hole was too large and let in more scattered light rays, which meant that the image came out more unfocused since the light rays hit multiple points on the white screen. The .1mm pinhole created the photos with the clearest resolution but due to the constraint on hole size, the amount of light let in was relatively little so the photos came out significantly darker than the other pinhole sizes. The 3mm pinhole performed the best because it was a happy medium between the high resolution of the .1mm pinhole and the well-exposed 5mm pinhole, so we used it as our chosen pinhole size for the additional photos.