Assignment 5: Pinhole Camera

15-463

Sylvia Han (sylviah)

PINHOLE CAMERA

Due: 11:59pm on Monday, October 29th, 2012

Overview

The goal of this assignment was to design and build a pinhole camera. A pinhole camera is essentially a dark box with a pinhole on one face and a screen on the opposite face. Light reflecting off an object will be directed into the pinhole and onto the screen. A digital camera is then used to take a picture of the screen with a long exposure in order to capture the image that would otherwise be difficult to see with the human eye.

Approach

For my pinhole camera, I used a small box and covered each side with black paper except the face that will act as a screen. The screen face is covered in white paper. On the opposite side of the screen, I cut one hole for the camera and one hole to place the pinhole mask on top. I then taped all sides of the box to ensure that no undesired light will enter the box.

Three different sized pinholes were created with the following diameters: 0.1 mm, 1 mm, and 5 mm. In an attempt to capture more light, a large aperture size is used with an F-stop of 2.8. The shutter speed was set to 60 seconds in order to take in as much light as possible.

Analysis

None of the images came out very clear. The images with the smallest pinhole, 0.1mm, were very dark. The larger the pinhole, the blurrier the image became. However, since more light was able to enter the box, more of the image became apparent.