mobile camera obscura: part i

june 2011

in the workshop

in my opinion, a camera obscura is the most basic form of photography. it is a very easy way to show how light can be manipulated and an image can be reproduced.

to quote the very useful wikipedia, “the device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved.”

the camera is made out of a cardboard box that also holds other activities and lessons that helps us teach photography to anyone and everyone that is interested.

we decided against actually creating physical images on photo paper because of high costs, complexity in a mobile state, and just inefficiency. so, instead of one hole, there are two holes on one side of the box. one hole was for the light to enter the box, and one hole acts was a viewfinder for the student.

a camera obscura can be created in entire rooms, provided the room is dark enough and the pinhole size is correctly calculated. the image will be sharper based on the size of the pinhole, but as the size of the pinhole decreases, the image becomes dimmer. this is the idea of lens aperture on your camera.

here is a beautiful example by Mauricio Asial in a bedroom:

since my box was only 18” x 12” x 12”, i did not exactly have the same amount of space as a large room. la paz is also very sunny during the day, so i needed to make sure that the image was bright and clear when my students would look into the box to see the reproduced image. i also did not want to sacrifice the image quality, because then my students would not know what they are looking at if everything was out of focus.

while trying to design this camera, i stumbled across this digital pinhole camera idea.

this ended up being really similar to my final design, except i replaced the digital camera cut-out with a cut-out for a human eye instead. and swapped the locations of both holes for viewing and the pinhole.

i started out with a needle-sized pinhole at first, but the image was too dim to see. i continued to make the pinhole larger to see the image become brighter, but more and more out of focus. luckily, scott found a school supplies store and i purchased a small magnifying glass.

below you can see red and black tape around two holes. the red hole is for the pinhole, and the black tape is the viewfinder.

after a few hours of trial and error, i was able to align the magnifying glass with the ray of light that entered the box in a position that produced a clear, bright, in-focus image that

was then reproduced on the spray-painted back wall of the box.

after the first day of implementation in the streets, i realized that the magnified image was simply not big enough. it worked, but it needed an upgrade. so, a bigger magnifying glass was inserted before the next day out on the streets.

i know this may be very hard to understand, and i apologize if it is very confusing for those that are not entirely familiar with the idea of a camera obscura or pinhole photography. regardless, i was extremely excited when this ended up working (and so were hundreds of bolivians over the course of two days).

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mobile camera obscura: part ii

tuesday was my first day out on the streets with this mobile camera obscura. i ventured out with sarah and sylvia to our route that covered the commercio market, plaza murillio, and other hot spots researched by espacio cultural creative.

it was a huge success. over the course of three and a half hours and at five different locations, we were able to let people of all ages, lifestyles, and professions learn a little bit about photography through the mobile camera obscura and other optical viewfinders that we also created out of pvc tubing and mirrors. we attracted over 110 people in this time frame, beating our previous high of 25.

we attracted curious pedestrians with the strange-looking PVC viewfinders and the make-shift sign that asked, “do you want to see la paz?”

our new students would first look at the viewfinders before i let them look through the mobile camera obscura. as their eyes adjusted from the bright day to the dark box, their confusion set in. how can i see everything behind me? why is everything upside down?

we would then ask each person what they thought was inside the box, before revealing only a magnifying glass. 

as i mentioned in part i, the first attempt with the camera had a very small magnifying glass which was upgraded to a much bigger one (3.5 inches). this made the image larger and more obvious, which resulted in more popularity of the camera. wednesday we went to plaza santa cruz, eguina, and san francisco. we attracted 102 in only two and a half hours.

there is no doubt that the people of la paz have taken a keen interest on this little box of magic, so my project has been approved to take the next step forward. we are going to build it for real. that means we will be getting wood, drills, sandpaper, paint, and whatever else we need to make this box a more common sight on the streets.

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mobile camera obscura: part iii

it is not nearly finished, but here is a sneak peak. there are still several problems that need to be addressed. this version is smaller than the first, which is causing problems with focusing the magnifying lens. in the first version, the magnifying lens could sit inside the box to produce a sharp image, but now i need to keep it outside the box, which is not making me too happy. the lens is now exposed and the durability of the camera concerns me.

i was able to take a photo of the image being produced, however it will always look better when the cover is on, and when you

are looking through the viewfinder hole.

here is a comparison between both versions. as you can see, version one was much bigger with a huge image.

now i need to figure out how to make it better, more durable, and add some color! (and remove all that ugly tape)

oh, and also while i was in el alto, version one of the camera was at the ludateca, and it was apparently one of the biggest successes. lines and lines of people trying to see what was inside that little box.

chao chao.