Pinhole Camera Project

The purpose of this project is to see how a camera works by making a home-made model.
By seeing what materials can create a pinhole camera,
I can see how my digital camera works at home!

How A Pinhole Camera Works:
My group (Doug & Mason) all brought materials that, when combined,
made a pinhole camera,
The main structure, or body, of the camera is made out of an cylindrical oatmeal box, the shutter is made from black paper and the hole is made with a pin, hence creating the name: Pinhole camera.
The size of the hole determines the focal lengths and projection. When light is entered into the Light tight box, the image is projected onto the paper. The Light rays from an object pass into the small hole to form an image!

The aperture of the projected image is about 100 times smaller than the original distance and size. The image is flipped vertically and horizontally when developed. The amount of light that gets inside the box and/or pinhole size also determines the quality of the resulting image. The larger the pinhole, the more scattered the light, and the less sharp the resulting image.


Materials:
Quaker Oatmeal box
Elmer's Glue
Krazy Glue
An aluminum can
A pin
Black paper
Tape Measure
A very sharp razor or X-Acto


How To Make and Use Your Camera:
First cut a .5 inch X .5 inch square in the middle of the oatmeal container.
Then cut the top and bottom of the aluminum can off.
Now cut it in half, hot dog style! Next take the flat aluminum and cut out a 2 in.X 3in. rectangle. This should be rounded off at the edges. You can recycle the rest of the can.
Attach it to the oatmeal box's inside, and then glue black paper to the inside of the box so it's tatally dark and then create a sliding flap for the shutter with strips of black paper and tape. Now insert the film strip without exposing it (in a special bag or dark room) with tape, close the shutter and prepare to take pictures!!! When taking pictures make sure your box/base is on a sturdy surface with something heavy (ie: dictionary) on top of it. Make sure the item on top doesn't have it's shadow covering the pinhole after you open the shutter. Then keep the shutter open for the amount of time you'd wish (People say from 10 sec.'s to 10 minutes, so experiment). Then close the shutter, take your film out, and develop!

Mr. Hiller's best result using our camera:








How the Pinhole Camera Works:













My group had a pretty smooth experience with using our Pinhole camera. We found a website that explained how to step by step, with pictures and the author had a good sense of humor making it a little interesting to read. Making the pinhole camera was a little stressful because there's so many steps to it, but in the end it was worth it! After we took our two pictures (one of a car and one of the football field) we had them developed but realized that all that the whole paper was black; and since the colors were inverted, it was actually white. This tells me that we had let too much light in rather than too little. Mr. Hiller pointed out to us how our cap was letting some light in which helped explain the result. The next time, if we have a next time, we try to take another picture we will make sure the camera is light tight by using tin foil wrapped around it!!