Photography - Camera Obscura

For my second blog I am going to talk about camera obscura as we love going there (i.e. Camera Obcura in Edinburgh). As a family we consider it the best tourist destination in Edinburgh. I have been told how it works before however researching for this blog means now I really understand it!
Camera obscura (which means dark room in Latin) was the first form of photography. It is an optical device that projects the image of its surroundings onto a screen upside down and the wrong way round.
It is very ancient technology and the first recorded experiments with camera obscura (pinhole cameras) were in 500BC by a Chinese thinker called Mo Tsu. It didn’t change for centuries and its main use was for observing the sun without hurting your eyes. However in 1550 a man called Cardano replaced the pinhole with a lens which led to a brighter picture and, after moving either the lens or the screen, a picture which was still in focus.


Basically it is a dark room with a small hole in one wall. On the wall opposite the hole an image is formed of whatever is outside. The size of the hole is very important, a small hole produces an image which is dim, a larger hole produces a brighter image which is less focused. The science behind it is that rays of light travel in straight lines and change when they are reflected and partly absorbed by an object, retaining information about the colour and brightness.  In order to produce a reasonably clear projected image the aperture has to be 1/100th the distance from the screen or less. Our eyes work much the same way as a camera obscura.


While camera obscuras were exciting in Victorian times, they are novelty items now due to the advancements in photography. However they do serve a useful purpose in demonstrating the basics of photography to a generation who can just point and press and get high quality photos, and encourage curious minds.


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