The Pin Hole Camera.
A pin hole camera
is very easy to make, but to take pictures with it you will need
access to a means of developing the pictures.
The principle is identical to the camera obscura experiment.
This time we will use a biscuit tin instead of a box. My preference
is Bourbons, but this is a photographic irrelevence - this is
really what biscuit tins were made for!
Take the lid off the tin and have a hole punched in the middle,
this hole should be small, no more than 1.5mm across - put the
lid back on the tin and that's it, one pin hole camera! Ok, not
quite, biscuit tins are invariably highly reflective inside and
reflected light will be a problem. To prevent this stick matt
black paper onto the inside of the lid, leaving a hole for the
"pinhole" to shine through, this is exactly how the
examples were taken. If you are really keen you can paint the
inside with matt black paint.
To take pictures you will need the assistance of a friend with
some means of processing black and white pictures. All they need
do is tape a piece of printing paper in the back of your tin,
in the safety of the darkroom. Put the lid back on and tape up
the lid with black electrical insulating tape, cover the hole
with another piece of electrical tape and take outside. Set up
the camera on a steady surface, untape the hole and leave the
camera for about a minute. Tape up the hole and return to the
darkroom to process the paper and consume bourbons. This may
take several attempts before you get the exposure time correct
but all being well quite good results can be obtained. The measure
of success is the number of bourbons left over - the more left
over is a measure of how consumed with the task you were.
Using this technique will give you a paper negative, this can
in turn be contacted to another piece, exposed and developed
to produce a positive. If you follow this process to the end
you will have in effect performed the Calotype process announced
by William Fox Talbot in 1839. Alternatively you can emply a
little computer technology and scan the negative and then reverse
it in a photo editing package.
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