Pinhole Cameras

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The Pinhole Camera

History: By the fifth century, the beginnings of modern photography were underway. The first accounts of pinhole experimentation were recorded in the tenth century, when recorded Yu Chao-Lung used model pagodas to make pinhole images on a screen. Also, Arabian physicist and mathematician Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haitam) used pinholes to view an eclipse of the sun. He arranged three candles in a row and put a screen with a small hole between the candles and the wall, noting that images were formed only by means of the small holes and that the right-most candle made an image to the left on the wall, and deduced the linearity of light. Then, during the Renaissance, Fillippo Brunelleschi used a pinhole perspective device to understand vanishing-point and one-point-perspective in painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. The first detailed description of image formation from a pinhole came from Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks in the late 1400's. In 1545 the Dutch physician Reiner Gemma Frisius published the first illustration of pinhole optics used to view an eclipse of the sun.

Then, in the 1850s, Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster, was one of the first to make pinhole photographs, and coined the word "pinhole." English scientists, such as Sir William Crookes, John Spiller and William de Wiveleslie Abney also experimented with the pinhole technique. In fact, the oldest existing pinhole photographs were probably made by the English archeologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) during his excavations in Egypt during the 1880s. Petrie's camera, or "biscuit box," had a simple lens in front of the pinhole. These early photographic emulsions were slow, and only until dry plate emulsions in the 1870s did it...

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...es a pinhole has a usable circular image of approx. 125 degrees. The image diameter is about 3 1/2 times of any focal length. The image will fade towards the edges because of the increasing focal distance. With curved film planes a pinhole camera may have a circle of coverage of almost 180 degrees if the pinhole is made in very thin material.

Exposure times are normally long compared to a regular camera--usually about fifteen to twenty seconds, depending on the amount of light. Some photographers use a grey filter (neutral density filter) to increase exposure times when using film where exposure times are short. Filters may also be used to control contrast in multigrade papers, or to control color when using color film or Ilfochrome paper. Well, there it is.

Bibliography

http://neon.airtime.co.uk/pinhole/

http://www.photo.net/photo/pinhole/pinhole.htm

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