DIY camera obscura out of the box. How to make a camera obscura at home. Human eye and pinhole camera
In this tutorial we will show you how to make a pinhole camera using a very simple method. We only need a protective cover from the camera, but not the one from the lens, but which covers the camera bayonet.
Many applications have an effect that mimics this camera. These effects are used quite often. However, there is no such effect that accurately repeats the picture taken by the camera obscura, so we are going to show you how to make a camera at home from your DSLR.
We only need a protective cover from the body of the camera, a piece of the wall from an aluminum can, a needle or pin, scissors, some dark electrical tape, fine sandpaper and a drill.
The result, of course, will not be perfect: the distance between the cover and the sensor on most SLR cameras is not very suitable for obtaining the effect we want, and this problem is not easy to fix. But if you don't pay too much attention to the impressionistic lack of focus, then it will be fun for you to take such pictures.
How to make a pinhole camera, step by step.
1. Make a hole in the center of the protective cover.
It should be about 5 mm. It is best to use a 5 mm drill for this. Make sure that the cover is removed from the camera when drilling! Then be sure to cut off the chips sticking out of the hole and sand it with sandpaper. This must be done so that these pieces do not fall into the camera or even worse on the matrix.
2. Micro puncture.
Now we take a piece of an aluminum can, or foil and pierce, with a # 7 needle, a hole in the center. Now we process with sandpaper so that everything is smooth and beautiful. Using electrical tape, we attach the foil to the lid so that the centers of all holes coincide.
3. We shoot.
The tiny aperture we get tells us that the shutter speed needs to be long, which means we'll need a tripod. You will have to use only manual settings, and turn on the histogram on the display to determine the correct exposure and composition. Try experimenting with flash for additional lighting.
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Photography is, in general, a miracle. Art that is created with the help of technical means. And these technical means (cameras) can be fantastically simple. In this article, we will tell you how to make a pinhole camera with handy tools - a matchbox or a tin can.
No need to laugh - such cameras give very interesting pictures, despite their primitiveness. But primitive does not mean bad, because the paintings of ancient people and sculptures of the great Pablo Picasso were also made with the help of improvised means, and their artistic value is not disputed, probably, by anyone. Of course, pinhole shooting is fun for everyone. But any art usually begins exactly where the amateur acts - that is, a person who sincerely likes what he does.
So what is a pinhole camera and how can you make it? Its main difference from other cameras is the lack of lenses. The role of the lens in the pinhole is played by a hole with perfectly straight edges, drilled or punctured in the camera body. Film may be used in some versions of these cameras. Others use photographic paper. The most common pinhole camera is made from a matchbox, to which a supply and a receiving film cassette are attached. Let's tell you in order how to make them.
How to make a camera obscura: option number 1
A 36 × 24 mm hole is cut in the bottom of the box. This bottom is a film hold-down frame. The inner walls of the box are painted black to protect the film space from sunlight. A piece of cardboard (shutter holder) is attached to the outer part of the box with a rectangular window cut into it with electrical tape, also with a cut window. And between the shutter holder and the box itself, a shutter made of opaque material is inserted.
The feeding and receiving cameras are tightly attached to the body of our camera with electrical tape. Once again, we focus on the density of the winding: if there are gaps, the photos will not work! There is fresh, unused (unexposed) film in the feed cassette. You can buy a standard loaded cassette, or you can charge it yourself (some models of old Soviet cameras have such cassette devices). As for the receiving cassette, some older cameras also have similar devices.
And finally, the last stage - a piece of foil is glued to the box with a tiny hole pierced by a needle, which should be located in the center of the 36 × 24 mm hole cut in the lid. The edges of the small hole should be as flat as possible. The film is loaded into the camera, the box is closed. All! You can shoot. One detail - it is better to photograph with a pinhole camera at long exposures. And then the result will be amazing.
How to make a camera obscura: option number 2
The second variant of the pinhole camera, which we will discuss here, is very simple. To create it, you just need cardboard, scissors and glue. It is better that the cardboard from which the camera box is assembled is black on at least one side. Why is this needed? Black color neutralizes any internal reflections as much as possible. The insides of a conventional camera are traditionally black for the same reason.
If a finished box serves as the material for your experiments, it should be painted from the inside with black paint, just like in the first version of the pinhole, which we have already told you about here. The already assembled product is carefully glued with black tape to prevent the insidious sunlight from entering the film, which can light it up.
To make the box, we need three cardboard rectangles 10 × 12.5 cm, two rectangles 12.5 × 12.5 cm, one 12.5 × 15 cm, two strips 2.5 × 12.5 cm and two 2, 5 × 10 cm.
- First, we make a removable camera back. It is assembled from a 12.5 × 15 cm rectangle and a 2.5 cm strip. Draw a 10 × 12.5 cm rectangle in the middle of the rectangle. Use a ready-made template. Put a 2.5 cm strip along the drawn lines and fasten it with small pieces of tape. Checking the inner size. It should be 10 × 12.5 cm. This is necessary for the film to enter freely. The joints must be properly glued with black tape.
- Making a camera box. Put the front of the camera with the black side up. We put two rectangles 12.5 × 12.5 cm and two rectangles 10 × 12.5 cm tightly. Glue them together with tape. Then we collect the box and put the backdrop inside. The box is secured around with a rubber band. This allows the backdrop to fit snugly into the box. With a few pieces of tape, you need to grab the box to ensure its high-quality gluing. All corners are properly glued with the same tape.
- We drill a hole. A small square piece of metal (bronze, aluminum, or another thin metal) is taken, placed on a wooden or cardboard substrate. A nail is inserted into the pencil eraser and a hole is gradually drilled. One little trick is to hold your pencil upright. If the hole is uneven, the picture quality will be affected.
- We connect the square with the hole. With a tape we attach a piece of metal with a hole to the box of our camera. For the shutter, glue a piece of tape at one end. In the lowered state, it will close the hole and act as a shutter. That's it, the pinhole camera is ready to take magical pictures.
He proposes to make a miracle invention, known even before our era and first described by Leonardo da Vinci. Its sizes vary from a matchbox to huge halls. Camera obscura in Latin means "dark room". The device allows you to transfer real images to the screen. True, here's the bad luck - upside down 🙂 But it's even more interesting. For centuries, artists used the camera obscura to create landscapes, until scientists invented chemical compounds that are sensitive to light. This is how the first photos appeared!
See what masterpiece can be created with a pinhole camera.
An upside-down image of Fall Central Park in New York was displayed on the walls and ceiling. Photo taken by Abelardo Morell with a pinhole camera. Darken the room, - he says, - make a small hole for light - and the pictures of the world on the other side of the window will settle in your house.
Hm ... - I don't know ... But the idea is seductive 🙂
Today we will make a simpler device than the one used by Morell. But no less interesting.
We will need:
- Disposable plastic cup (dark color is better)
- Push pin or sewing pin
- Black acrylic paint (available from bookstores or mix gouache with 1 to 1 PVA glue)
- Brush
- Sheet of parchment paper 12 × 12cm (you can try replacing with tracing paper or a thin white napkin)
- Stationery
- Candle + matches, flashlight
- Small figures or silhouettes for viewing
What to do:
- Cover the cup thoroughly with black paint on both sides, let the paint dry
- Make a very small hole in the center of the bottom of the cup using a pin or button. This will be the lens of the pinhole camera
- Secure the paper to the cup with an elastic band. It will serve as a screen for the pinhole camera.
- Light a candle or flashlight, darken the room and observe the light, holding the glass on your outstretched hand with the screen facing you.
- Take a closer look and you will see a small crescent light spot on the dark background of the paper - this is an image of a flame, and it is "standing on the head"!
- You can put various silhouettes in front of the flashlight, experiment with distances and shapes, you can flip the silhouettes, while getting normal images.
How camera obscura works easy to understand from this figure:
Interesting ideas:
2. Here are some very good articles with detailed instructions for making a homemade camera on the principle of a pinhole camera
3. If instead of paper you attach photographic paper to the cup, you can get images that can be stored and shown to friends!
Question: Does the eye look like a camera obscura? Is it possible?
Finally, a couple more masterpieces from Abelardo Morell 🙂
A dream-vivid and very harsh image of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan materializes over crumpled sheets. To create this surreal picture, Morell installed his camera in a room that served as a camera obscura and left the shutter open for five hours. The resulting vision was captured on film. He also used a prism to flip the image.
Color, shape, perspective - everything was mixed in a multi-colored puzzle created by Morell in the living room of a Venetian house. “I want people to wonder where it came from,” says the master, who projected the view of the Grand Canale onto the wall where the jungle was already painted. The chandelier shadow completes the hypnotic chaos.
(lat. camera obscūra - "dark room") - the simplest type of device that allows you to obtain an optical image of objects. It is a light-tight box with a hole in one of the walls and a screen (frosted glass or thin white paper) on the opposite wall.
In its original form, it was a darkened room with a hole in one of the walls. Images of objects outside the room were projected through a hole onto the opposite wall, and people in the room could observe these images and transfer them to paper. The time of the invention of the camera obscura is unknown, but already in the 11th century it was used to observe a solar eclipse and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) knew about it. Around the 16th century, the camera obscura was made in the form of an opaque box. The Italian mathematician and physicist Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) installed a lens in it, and projected the image using a mirror onto a frosted glass plate. The resulting image could be outlined on paper. ( E. Mitchell "Photography" 1988)
The circuit is very simple. Light rays passing through a hole approximately 0.5-5 mm in diameter create an inverted image on the screen.
Below, under the photo, he gave an explanation of what he did and how. Used Foma Variant paper, developer Tetenal Dokumol. Exposures ranged from 1 to 3 minutes. But the most interesting thing is how he made the camera.
Inspired, I ran to the store for Pringles chips. But having tried on a sheet of paper 10x15 in size, I realized that a small package would not work for such purposes, and I didn't want to bother cutting a large one into small "cameras". I began to think about what to do next. I rummaged through the kitchen drawer and found a suitable coffee can. Having tried on a sheet of photographic paper, I made a hole with an awl at a height of 5 cm from the bottom of the can. Since the nylon lid of the can transmits light, I laid an opaque film in which the photo paper is packed. The hole was sealed with black duct tape. The correspondence of the focal length to the hole diameter can be viewed at pinhole.ru.
It turned out to be such a miracle of engineering.
Next time I'll pick a more presentable jar.
By the way, photographic paper and chemicals can be ordered from the Slavich Trading House directly from the factory. The minimum order amount is 1,000 rubles. Nice managers will take the order and send it by mail.
For the experiment I used photographic paper Unibrom 160 PE (Birch) - semi-cardboard, glossy, normal. I loaded it into a jar in the dark. You can do this with red light.
The first shot failed. Due to the fact that the shutter speed was slow for these lighting conditions. The shooting took place at my friends' artists in the studio under the light of lamps. 5 minutes was clearly not enough. I loaded the next sheet and left it in the room overnight.
The picture, of course, is not indicative, but this time at least something worked out.
Since the paper is negative, and as a result, the image turned out to be negative, I had to perform several manipulations in a graphics editor, after scanning, display the image and invert it.
The original paper negatives look like this.
There is an expression: "photographic accuracy", because it is believed that nothing can be more objective than photography. But actually it is not. What photographs convey is far from reality itself. Perhaps, pictures similar to Vermeer's canvases correspond to her more accurately. You can get them using a tin can with a neat hole. How exactly - says the photo editor "NS" Vyacheslav LAGUTKIN.What Leonardo da Vinci encrypted
Heavy army transport rolled through the summer. Inside, in complete darkness, an ordinary conscript was lost. It smelled of heated tarpaulin, tires, boots and road. Suddenly, at the turn, a ray of the sun hit through a hole in the tent, and upside down images of houses, trees, figures of people ran along the side of the truck. So twenty years ago I was faced with the phenomenon of a pinhole camera.
This visual effect has been known to mankind for thousands of years. The Chinese philosopher Mo Tsu described this phenomenon in the 5th century BC Aristotle, observing the same effect, could not comprehend its cause. Separate references to the creation of the first apparatus reproducing this phenomenon point to Roger Bacon (XIII century). Leonardo da Vinci wrote about how to use this device in painting in his encrypted works, but they were able to unravel his secret writing only in 1797. Nevertheless, information about how it is possible to copy reality with the help of a camera obscura spread among artists even before the beginning of the 17th century. In a dark room with a hole in the wall, the exterior was projected onto the opposite wall. All that remained was to pick up paints and apply them to the image. Many landscapes, portraits and still lifes were painted in this way. The use of the camera obscura in the work of the great Dutch artist Jan Vermeer is clearly visible. Experts confirm that, for example, in the portrait "The Girl in the Red Hat" Vermeer conveys the diffuse reflections characteristic of the pinhole. The same technique is indicated by the numerous clusters of light spots in another painting by Vermeer, View of Delft.
By the middle of the 17th century, portable pinhole cameras, equipped with lenses to enhance color brightness, sharpness and contrast, appeared.
Rear view of the pinhole camera (later called "pinhole") with the top and back covers removed
Nowadays, photographers, fed up with the hard, textured image of conventional lens lenses, have re-opened the camera obscura, which is now called a pinhole or stenoper.
This is not a bank! It's a camera!
What attracted Vermeer's camera obscura? And why do modern photographers give up expensive lenses for a box with a hole? The camera obscura has many advantages: one of them is obtaining an unusually soft and plastic image, devoid of the excesses of specifics. All this, of course, provided that the dimensions of the hole are accurate and the edges are even.
Another advantage is that the snapper does not need to be focused, because there is no lens in it, and the depth of field is infinite. That is, everything is sharp - from what is located a few centimeters away to the horizon.
Lyudmila Zinchenko. Red Square. 2008 year. Silver camera prize. Photo taken by pinhole
Optical distortions, such as chromatic aberration (a light border around the contour of a contrasting image), will never bother a stop-shooting photographer, unlike colleagues who use lenses. And also, if the film is placed at the same distance from the hole (bent in an arc), perspective distortions will be corrected.
On your own, a stencil can be made from cans of coffee and carbonated drinks, barrels and refrigerators, carriages and vans, matchboxes and shoe boxes. And, of course, from cameras (it must be borne in mind that the more obscura, the more detailed the image).
How to make a camera obscura with your own hands
A Canon 400 D SLR digital camera was taken as a sample for making a pinhole based on a camera. Any camera with a change of optics can be used in its place. |
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| A hole with a diameter of up to 1 cm must be made in the dummy cover, which is used to cover the camera (camera) when the lens is removed, exactly in the center. | |
| A pinhole lens - a plate with a hole - must be attached from the inside, that is, to the side of the cap facing the inside of the camera. It is better if the surface of the cap, or "lens", is not shiny, but black or matte | |
| On this the lens for stenop is ready |
Almost any camera can be such a camera. If it is a camera with interchangeable optics such as Zenit, Kiev, Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Minolta, Zorkiy, FED, etc., it is enough to remove the lens and use a dummy cover, which is used to close the camera for protection when lens removed. A hole with a diameter of up to 1 cm must be made in the plug exactly in the center, and the "lens" for the stenoper - a plate with a hole - must be attached from the inside, that is, to the side of the plug facing the inside of the camera. It is important to make sure that the cap from the inside, as well as the "lens", does not have bright shiny surfaces, it is better if they are black and matte. The helpers here are sandpaper, velvet, paint, glue. Caps can be purchased at any major photo store and are cheap. A very simple option is to seal the hole for the lens on the camera with black paper with a hole of the required size exactly in the middle.
If the camera lens is not removable, you can dismantle it or simply remove the lenses and diaphragm blades and install a plate with a hole in it. For this purpose, both "Lyubitel", and "Smena", and "Iskra" and "Moscow" are suitable.
The photographer will use a tin can or his own room as a stenoper, after darkening it and making a hole in the curtains opposite a huge sheet of photosensitive material (photographic paper or film) rolled into the entire wall, will make one hole or several in different places (the image is bizarrely repeated and superimposed on itself), depends only on his capabilities and imagination. Finally, you can order a branded pinhole via the Internet - a beautiful wooden box with a perfect hole in the side. The pleasure is not cheap - an average of 200 euros.
Obscura shooting features
Having chosen the subject of photography, you need to direct the obscura at it (having previously installed it motionlessly) and open the hole. Long exposures equalize films of different sensitivities, for example, 100 and 400 units, which eliminates the need to choose. In good daylight, exposure can be 10-15 seconds, in bright sun - 2-4 seconds, while in the evening or in a dimly lit room - from 8-15 minutes (dim electric light) to 1 hour or more. At the end of shooting, you should close and transfer the film to the next frame, if you do not want to achieve bizarre effects by multiple exposure. The exact shooting time, of course, can be prompted by a camera with an exposure meter or an exposure meter (there are even special plates for calculating exposure on branded pinholes), but selection of exposure empirically (several dozen frames in different lighting conditions) is quite reliable and simple, especially if the pinhole is homemade.
Photo taken by the pinhole, the manufacturing process of which is shown above
Why is such shooting attractive? Firstly, incomprehensible simplicity: no complicated mechanics, electronics, autofocus multi-lens optics - just a box with a hole and a film loaded into it.
Secondly, unpredictability: the lack of a viewfinder, and therefore the ability to build a composition in the frame, presupposes shooting "at random", "on a whim" - with a lively immediate picture as a result.
And, finally, thirdly, contemplation: the long exposures typical of pinhole do not tolerate fuss and easily tune in to a leisurely philosophical mood.
A pinhole, unlike a camera, allows you to capture not a moment, but a state. In fact, this temple on Valaam is full. But on the film in the form of penumbra only those who stood still for an hour, and those who left, are not visible on the film.
Dictionary of photographic terms
Pinhole (from the English pinhole, pin - a pin, hole - a hole) - a hollow darkened camera with a small hole (often made by a pin) for obtaining an image when light passes through the hole. Used in art photography. The same as the stenoper (from the French Sténopé).
Obscura, camera obscura (from Latin obscurus - dark) is an incorrect, but widespread name for pinhole. Historically, the obscura was a camera with a small lens, not a hole.
Multiple exposure - multiple shooting for one frame.
Exposure metering - light measurement taking into account the sensitivity of the film or matrix to determine the shutter speed (shooting time) and aperture (the size of the opening for shooting). When shooting with pinhole, only the shutter speed is determined, since the aperture, that is, the hole, is constant.
Light meter - metering device.
Chromatic aberration - optical distortion in the form of a light contour along the edge of the contrasting image (border between light and dark). It occurs due to the difference in the length of the light waves.