Pinhole photography - introduction

Hi, in my presentation I'd like to introduce you to something probably you didn't hear. Pinhole photography.


(you can buy pinhole camera kit, they're very popular in Japan :)

Basically for pinhole photography we need pinhole camera (or at least some kind of hole).
Pinhole photography is lensless photography. A tiny hole replaces the lens. Light passes through the hole; an image is formed in the camera.

It's simply a light-proof box with a small hole in one side.

There's even one animal which uses pinholes for seeing - Nautilus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus)

In theory pinhole images should be as good as with using proper lens, however
they are softer, less sharp have an infinite depth of field and no distortion and much dimmer ( at least 4 times).
Pinhole images suffer from greater chromatic aberration than pictures made with a normal lens.
Pictures taken using pinhole camera looks more artistic, probably that's why it's still used.


Original pinhole camera origins are not well known, about 6th century BC the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti (or Mo Tsu) was to our knowledge the first to record the formation of an inverted image with a pinhole or screen.
In the western hemisphere Aristotle use pinhole camera to view solar eclipse (pinhole image formation mentioned in his work “Problems”).

Now I probably should also mention something about “Camera Obscura”
Camera Obscura is latin for "dark room" or "darkened chamber" and that's what it is (it's also ancestor of the modern camera).



The camera was actually a large room with a small hole that would be entered by the user. Light entering a small hole produces an inverted image on the opposite wall. Originally used to view solar eclipses. By the seventeenth century Camera Obscura was made portable by fitting a lens to one end of a box and using a sheet of glass at the opposite end to view the image. Mirror inserted inside at a 45 degree angle would reverse the image, giving the viewer corrected orientation.
After that (about 17th century) Camera Obscura become popular aid for sketching.
That explains now why Canaletto's drawings are so realistic.



This was great but has one big downside. Somebody had to paint the actual picture.
Fortunatelly for us in 1837 Jacques Daguerre invented photographic process for creating permanent pictures called Daguerreotype. Details of it were made public on French Academy of Sciences in 1839 and Daguerre named it the Daguerreotype.


The first picture of a person.

Now it takes only about 20 minutes to exposure image.
Daguerreotype has also some disadvantages. It's a direct photographic process (like polaroid but exposed on mirror polished metal) what means there was no negative from which multiple prints could be made from, that make every photo unique.
Some say, daguerreotype produces pictures much better than todays professional cameras. Unlike film and paper photography a properly sealed daguerreotype can potentially last indefinitely.





Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera
http://www.pinhole.art.pl/katalog.htm
http://photo.net/learn/pinhole/pinhole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype
http://daguerre.org/resource/history/history.html

Questions:
Have you ever heard about pinhole?
Do you think it's interesting?