Home Made Camera

15-463: Computational Photography
Ming Han Teh (mteh), Bowen Low (blow)


Background

The requirements for this project can be found on the course website.

Technique

We used a USPS Box of size 12.25 x 12.25 x 8.5 inch as the camera box, but later changed to using 6 x 12.25 x 8 inch as the screen was too far and resulted in very dark images. We noticed that this is probably due to light intensity being inverserly proportional to the square of the distance from source. We achieved this by inserting a piece of cardbox into the box. This way, we could vary our focal length too.

We originally tried 15s exposure, but found the resulting image to be too dark. Hence, having higher exposure of 30s or more helps for afternoon images or on cloudy days. However, on very bright mornings, an exposure of as low as 10s might be fine.

Finaly, we also found that playing with the ISO levels helped. When there is insufficient light (cloudy days), having a higher ISO (e.g. 800 vs 80) can result in better images.

In some of our images, the images appear dark on one side due to the obstruction by the extendable camera lens blocking some of the light, and the pinhole being close to the camera.

In all the images below, the images were rotated but not flippped.


Photos of Camera Model


We put a UPS envelope on top to block off any additional light that might "pass through" the top of the box. We also had a sliding mechanism (via the black strip with pinholes) to faciliate switching between holes of varying diameter.
In this original setup, we had not taped the edges of the camera with black duct tape, and this spoiled a few of our original photos as there was light leaking into the box. We later put black tape around the camera and the problem was solved.

Pinhole Sizes

0.1mm diameter

1mm diameter

5mm diameter

2mm diameter

Although the "formula" (1.9 x sqrt( f x lambda)) gave 5 x 10^(-4) as the ideal diameter, We found 2mm to be the ideal diameter for us.



Bells and Whistles (Light Painting)

Saying HI!

X-Men Banshee

Yin Yang

Tornado