Pinhole Camera

In the unit Light I learned about what light rays are and how light functions.The most challenging part of this unit I believe was to build the pinhole camera. When building it I ran into a couple issues where I could not get the camera light proof and if a pinhole camera is not light proof it won’t work. The reason for this is because the light will come through the edges and cause the paper to react taking a picture of something else not what you wanted to. I would say that I am most proud of how my camera turned out.

Camera,JC,2015

Photo of Classroom, JC, 2015

A pinhole camera is the most basic kind of camera that only uses light and paper to make a picture. The light comes through a small hole made in the camera and hits the paper. Since light=energy and the paper is light sensitive because of a special blend of chemicals, which just need energy to react. When the light hits the chemicals it heats them up causing them to react. This reaction when developed shows the image you were trying to capture upside down since there is no lens to change the direction of the light or anything slowing down the light. This means that there is no refraction either.

In the diagram on the left is my camera and on the right is the salt shaker that I am taking a picture of. To find the distance needed to capture the entire salt shaker I used similar triangles.How I did this way found the height of the pinhole and the diameter of the camera and used Pythagoras theorem  to find the hypotenuse. Then I used found the angle by using tangent. After measuring the height of the salt shaker it was just using what we know about similar triangles to find the rest of the sides. The height of the pinhole is 3.3125 inches. The distance from the pinhole to the paper is 3.25 inches, and the height of the salt shaker is 15.25 inches.

Diagram, JC, 2015