A pinhole camera is a simple camera with a tiny aperture, made of a light-proof box or cylindrical object e.g. a coffee tin. Light from a scene passes through the aperture and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.
I made a pinhole camera out of a pringles container. I started off by painting the inside of it using thick black paint mixed with glue. I made sure to paint the inside with 2 layers of paint, using a hairdryer to dry the paint quicker. Because the lid was clear, I covered the whole thing with black electrical tape. This was so that when the lid was on, the container was completely light-proof.
Then, a pin, black electrical tape and a small rectangle of black card was used to create a small hole in the container. This is what was used as the aperture of the camera. To take pictures, I placed a piece of photo paper inside of the can making sure the shiny side was facing the hole and no paper was covering the hole. I did this in the darkroom with the lights off and made sure to put the lid back on before leaving so the paper didn’t accidentally get exposed to any light.
I went outside 6-7 different times and peeled back the tape that was being used as the shutter for different lengths of time for different exposures to the scene I was taking pictures of. I did this multiple times to figure out which exposure time was the best to get the most successful photos.
These 4 photos are the only ones that had distinguishable shapes and images on them as all the other ones I went out to take were either completely underexposed or completely overexposed so they were completely white or black with no actual image.
These are the 2 best photos I took. They were very white at first but I inverted the photo to reveal the actual image. Both of these had an exposure of an average of 6-8 seconds each. If I were to try pinhole camera photography again this is the exposure time I would start off with first.
These photos had an average exposure of 9-11 seconds each and came out overexposed. They were also done facing the sun which may be why there is a very dark space at the top part of the image where the sky should be. I didn’t invert these two photos because it made the pictures too difficult to see.