Camera Obscura

The purpose of this project is to create a camera obscura (pinhole camera) from scratch. The idea is to shine light through a very small aperture into a sealed box. The light will hit the opposite surface of the box and create an image of the outside world. To capture this image, we use a digital camera with long exposure time. Below are a few images of our camera obscura.

As you can see, this camera has two openings: one for the pinhole, and the other for the digital camera. We have several different pinholes of different sizes that we can freely exchange on our camera, and the other hole allows us to position our camera within the box in order to capture the images.

Below are some results from our camera, which has a focal length of 250mm. We display results for several different pinhole sizes:

0.7mm As you can see, this pinhole size is quite small, which creates very sharp, but very noisy images. Since less light can enter the camera with this aperture, we needed to expose the camera for a longer period of time to make the photos bright enough. These images appear darker because we did not set the exposure time to be high enough.
Scene 1	Scene 2
1.4mm Here, the image is sharp and not very noisy. This pinhole size is our best size.
Scene 1	Scene 2
7.0mm When we make the aperture too big, the image becomes extremely blurry since rays of light from many different angles hit the same parts of the image. Since the aperture is very large, more light can enter the camera, which means that if we expose the camera for even a short amount of time, the images appear brighter, which is the case for the images below.
Scene 1	Scene 2
Below, we display a few other images that we took using the 1.4mm aperture (except the bottom-right image, which was taken using the 0.7mm aperture).