Pinhole Camera

Written by Ian Walker as part of In Translation by Matthew Humphreys.

This is a camera obscura, the name comes from the Latin and means ‘dark chamber'

Step in and sit down. Turn off any phones you have, as the screen light will destroy the effect. Do not turn the screens on; to take photos. This is an experience, just enjoy it. Then use your words to tell your friends. This physical media, not AI slop for the algorithms.

IMPORTANT First close your eyes for about five minutes to adapt to the dark.

To fill the time I am going to tell you a story. Once Upon a Time… It is not a bedtime story so NO SNORING!

As you will notice the camera obscura you are in: is a large black box; big enough to walk into, as they have been for hundreds of years; often as with this one it is just a curtained off part of a room, where light can on only come in through one small hole, on one side. In this case window of the gallery shop front into the street. On the opposite side to the small hole is a black stretched cloth: The viewing screen!

This is a lensless camera obscura and is also referred to as a ‘pinhole camera’; you can make one with cereal box and a piece of tracing paper.

Camera Obscura have been around for a long time probably right back into Prehistory in cave paintings and from that and sacred underground spaces, such as Göbeklitepe, as signs of divinity and the powers of priest, priestess and shaman.

The earliest known written records of a pinhole image, is found in the Chinese text called Mozi, dated to around the 4th century BC western calendar, to a Chinese philosopher Mozi (c.470 BC—c.391 BC), a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohist School of Logic. This is earliest written record of light rays.

Other philosophers expanded on this. From Aristotle onwards to Ptolomey and the Han Chinese polymath Shen Kuo. They were used to study sunspots and eclipses, without going blind.

The Muslim physicist Ibn al-Haytham; one of the creators of the Scientific Method, critiqued Ptolemy's Almagest, Planetary Hypotheses, and Optics and after experiments inspired by Shen Kuo gave us the first modern scientific description of light rays creating the modern concept of optics used even to this day.

Painters since the cave times had realised they could get accurate images by tracing them from images through a small crack on to a stretched skin in a cave or tent, such paintings would have made the painter seem magical. We know that after reading a translation of Ibn al-Haytham’s works Leonardo da Vinci started experimenting with camera obscura.

In this lensless camera obscura as Ibn al-Haytham proved. If you follow the light ray path of the light reflected from the objects outside the camera obscura, you will see they result in a projected image of the scene outside the chamber on the viewing screen opposite to the hole, that is inverted and reversed.

When you open your eyes as they adjust and your brain begins to process the image; the first thing you will notice on the bottom right of the viewing screen is a white oblong. That is the shopfront sign opposite, after a moment you will realise the road and path are at the top of the viewing screen and that the traffic is moving the wrong way on Hall Gate’s one way street and you notice people walking along the paths, they are actually moving in the opposite direction to what is projected on the screen.

This then with the invention of lenses became more common in art and lead to discoveries about perspective and massive improvement in the quality of images in paintings that began in the Renaissance. Later in the 19th century Fox Talbot using Silver Nitrate to fix the images to glass plates invented the modern camera, but that is a whole other story.