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Principle of a pinhole camera. Light rays from an object pass through a small hole to form an image.
Holes in the leaf canopy project images of a solar eclipse on the ground.
A home-made pinhole camera (on the left), wrapped in black plastic to prevent light leaks, and related developing supplies.
A pinhole camera is a very simple camera with no lens and a single very small aperture. Simply explained, it is a light-proof box with a single hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. Cameras using small apertures, and the human eye in bright light both act like a pinhole camera.
The smaller the hole, the sharper the image, but the dimmer the projected image. Optimally, the size of the aperture, should be 1/100 or less of the distance between it and the screen.
A pinhole camera’s shutter is usually manually operated because of the lengthy exposure times, and consists of a flap of some light-proof material to cover and uncover the pinhole. Typical exposures range from 5 seconds to hours and sometimes days.
A common use of the pinhole camera is to capture the movement of the sun over a long period of time. This type of photography is called Solargraphy.
The image may be projected onto a translucent screen for real-time viewing (popular for observing solar eclipses; see also camera obscura), or can expose film or a charge coupled device (CCD). Pinhole cameras with CCDs are often used for surveillance because they are difficult to detect.
Contents
- 1 Invention of pinhole camera
- 2 Selection of pinhole size
- 3 Pinhole camera construction
- 4 Calculating the f-number & required exposure
- 5 World’s largest pinhole camera
- 6 See also
- 7 Notes and references
- 8 External links
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Invention of pinhole camera
As far back as the 4th century BC, Greeks such as Aristotle and Euclid wrote on naturally-occurring rudimentary pinhole cameras. For example, light may travel through the slits of wicker baskets or the crossing of tree leaves. The ancient Greeks, however, believed that vision is enabled by rays emitted from the eye. The discovery that vision results from rays entering the eye rather than being emitted by it enabled a much better understanding of the pinhole camera effect. It was the 10th-century Arab physicist, astronomer and mathematician, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), who published this idea in the Book of Optics in 1021 AD. He also invented the first pinhole camera after noticing the way light was streaming through a hole in a window shutter. He improved on the camera after realizing that the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image (though the less light). He designed the first camera obscura (Lat. dark chamber). As a side benefit of his invention, he was credited with being first man to shift physics from a philosophical to an experimental basis.
In the 5th century BC, the Mohist philosopher Mo Jing (??) in ancient China mentioned the effect of an inverted image forming through a pinhole. The image of an inverted Chinese pagoda is mentioned in Duan Chengshi’s (d. 863) book Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang written during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Along with experimenting with the pinhole camera and the burning mirror of the ancient Mohists, the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD) Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031-1095) experimented with camera obscura and was the first to establish geometrical and quantitative attributes for it.
In the 13th century, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon commented on the pinhole camera. Between 1000 and 1600, men such as Ibn al-Haytham, Gemma Frisius, and Giambattista della Porta wrote on the pinhole camera, explaining why the images are upside down. Pinhole devices provide safety for the eyes when viewing solar eclipses because the event is observed indirectly, the diminished intensity of the pinhole image being harmless compared with the full glare of the sun itself.
Around 1600, Giambattista della Porta reinvented the pinhole camera. It was not until 1850 that a Scottish scientist by the name of Sir David Brewster actually took the first actual photography with a pinhole camera. Sir William Crookes and William de Wiveleslie Abney were other early photographers to try the pinhole technique.
Selection of pinhole size
Generally, a smaller pinhole will result in sharper image resolution as the projected circle of confusion is smaller at the image plane. An extremely small hole, however, can produce significant diffraction effects and a less clear image due to the wave properties of light. Additionally, as the diameter of the hole approaches the thickness of the material in which it is punched, significant vignetting occurs, as less light reaches the edges of the image. This is due to the sides of the hole shading the light coming in at anything other than 90 degrees.
The best pinhole is perfectly round (since irregularities cause higher-order diffraction effects), and in an extremely thin piece of material. Industrially produced pinholes benefit from laser etching, but a hobbyist can still produce pinholes of sufficiently high quality for photographic work.
A photograph taken with a pinhole camera using an exposure time of 2 seconds
Some examples of photographs taken using a pinhole camera.
One often quoted method is to start with a sheet of brass shim or metal reclaimed from an aluminium drinks can, use fine sand paper to reduce the thickness of the centre of the material to the minimum, before carefully creating a pinhole with a suitably sized needle - sanding away the burrs on either side & rotating the pin as it glides in and out in order to produce a smooth circular hole.
A method of calculating the optimal pinhole diameter was first attempted by Jozef Petzval. The formula used today was evolved by Lord Rayleigh:
where d is diameter, f is focal length (distance from hole to photographic film) and ? is the wavelength of light, all expressed in meters.
For standard black-and-white film, a wavelength of light corresponding to yellow-green (550 nm) should yield optimum results. (For a pinhole-to-film distance of 1 inch (25 mm), this works out to a pinhole .22 mm in diameter. For 5 cm, the appropriate diameter is .32 mm. )
The depth of field is basically infinite, but this does not mean that no optical blurring occurs. The infinite depth of field means that image blur depends not on object distance, but on other factors, such as the distance from the aperture to the film plane, the aperture size, and the wavelength(s) of the light source.
Pinhole camera construction
Pinhole cameras are usually handmade by the photographer for a particular purpose. In its simplest form, the photographic pinhole camera consists of a light-tight box with a pinhole in one end, and a piece of film or photographic paper wedged or taped into the other end. A flap of cardboard with a tape hinge can be used as a shutter. The pinhole is usually punched or drilled using a sewing needle or small diameter bit through a piece of tinfoil or thin aluminum or brass sheet. This piece is then taped to the inside of the light tight box behind a hole cut through the box. An oatmeal box can be made into an excellent pinhole camera.
Pinhole cameras are often constructed with a sliding film holder or back so that the distance between the film and the pinhole can be adjusted. This allows the angle of view of the camera to be changed and also the effective f-stop ratio of the camera. Moving the film closer to the pinhole will result in a wide angle field of view and a shorter exposure time. Moving the film farther away from the pinhole will result in a telephoto or narrow angle view and a longer exposure time.
Pinhole cameras can also be constructed by replacing the lens assembly in a conventional camera with a pinhole. In particular, compact 35 mm cameras whose lens and focusing assembly has been damaged can be reused as pinhole cameras—maintaining the use of the shutter and film winding mechanisms. As a result of the enormous increase in f-number while maintaining the same exposure time, one must use a fast film in direct sunshine.
Calculating the f-number & required exposure
A pinhole camera made from an oatmeal box. The pinhole is in the centre. The black plastic which normally surrounds this camera (see picture above) has been removed.
A fire hydrant photographed by a pinhole camera made from a shoe box, exposed on photographic paper (top). The length of the exposure was 40 seconds. There is noticeable flaring in the bottom-right corner of the image, likely due to extraneous light entering the camera box.
The f-number of the camera may be calculated by dividing the distance from the pinhole to the imaging plane (the focal length) by the diameter of the pinhole. For example, a camera with a 0.02 inch (0.5 mm) diameter pinhole, and a 2 inch (50 mm) focal length would have an f-number of 2/0.02 (50/0.5), or 100 (f/100 in conventional notation).
Due to the large f-number of a pinhole camera, exposures will often encounter reciprocity failure. Once exposure time has exceeded about 1 second for film or 30 seconds for paper, one must compensate for the breakdown in linear response of the film/paper to intensity of illumination by using longer exposures.
Other special features can be built into pinhole cameras such as the ability to take double images, by using multiple pinholes, or the ability to take pictures in cylindrical or spherical perspective by curving the film plane.
These characteristics could be used for creative purposes. Once considered as an obsolete technique from the early days of photography, pinhole photography is from time to time a trend in artistic photography.
Related cameras, image forming devices, or developments from it include Franke’s widefield pinhole camera, the pinspeck camera, and the pinhead mirror.
NASA (via the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) has funded initial research into the New Worlds Mission project, which proposes to use a pinhole camera with a diameter of 10 m and focus length of 200,000 km to image earth sized planets in other star systems.
World’s largest pinhole camera
In an abandoned F-18 hangar at the closed El Toro fighter base in Irvine, California, a team of six photographer artists and an army of assistants created the world’s largest pinhole camera, using 1½ miles of 2″ wide black gorilla tape and 40 gallons of black spray paint to make the hangar light-tight. The aim was to make a black-and-white negative print of the Marine Corps air station with its control tower and runways, with the San Joaquin Hills in the background. The purpose was to subscribe to the Legacy Project, a photographic compilation and record of the airfield’s history before it is transformed into a giant urban park, as well as to demonstrate to the digital world the value of print making the 168-year-old way.
A huge piece of muslin cloth was made light sensitive by coating it with 80 litres of gelatin silver halide. and it was hung from the ceiling at a distance of about 80 feet (24 m) from a pinhole, just under ¼ inch in diameter, situated 15 feet (4.6 m) above ground level in the wall. The distance between the pinhole and the cloth was determined to be 80 feet (24 m) for best coverage, and the exposure time was calculated at 35 minutes. The opaque negative image print was developed in an Olympic-swimming-pool-size tray with 600 gallons of traditional developer and 1200 gallons of fixer, and was washed using fire hoses attached to two fire hydrants. The resulting finished print was nearly 108 ft (33 m) wide and 85 ft (26 m) high and was exhibited for the first time at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, on September 6, 2007. .
See also
- Camera obscura
- Pinhole glasses
- New Worlds Mission
- Spatial filter
- Zone plate
- Dirkon
- Fox Talbot
- Wolf Howard
- Billy Childish
- Jesse Richards
- Pinhole camera model
- Nautilus (its lens-less eye functions as a pinhole camera)
Notes and references
- ^ “Light Through the Ages”.
- ^ “How Islamic inventors changed the world”, The Independent. Accessed April 6, 2007
- ^ Needham, Joseph (1986). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 4, Physics and Physical Technology, Part 1, Physics. Taipei: Caves Books Ltd. Page 82.
- ^ a b Needham, Joseph (1986). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 4, Physics and Physical Technology, Part 1, Physics. Taipei: Caves Books Ltd. Page 98.
- ^ A reconsideration of Roger Bacon’s theory of pinhole images
- ^ History of Photography and the Camera - Pinhole Camera to Daguerreotype
- ^ What is a Pinhole Camera?
- ^ Pinhole photography history
- ^ Smith, Sonya (July 13, 2006). “World’s largest photo taken in defunct El Toro base hangar”. The Orange County Register.
- ^ The Legacy Project press release, dated June 8, 2007
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