What you see above, is my pin hole camera. I digital scribble out my full name for privacy reasons. What you see on the left is the picture I took... Not exactly clear, but an attempt was made, I if I ever decide to do this again in the future, I'll know that I need much more time. It was also interesting to see how the custom exposure picture developed so much quicker than this one, but I'll get to that later.
With the diagram on the right, you can see how exactly the process of capturing such light happens. The light reflects off of the figure/focus, and the those reflecting light waves are isolated as they go through the pin hole, burning and chemically changing the photosensitive paper. When the light actually goes through the hole, it gets flipped, both upside-down and backwards. After there's been enough exposure time, the picture is supposed to be developed in a dark room, utilizing other chemicals and water to clearly show the changes that happened. Think of it as using UV rays after writing on paper with invisible ink.
Now, there's actually one important aspect of setting up the layout, and that would be calculations. Seeing as how there's some trigonometry involved, I had to calculate the height of my object, the pinhole, and then approximate the distance between the 2. Now I have a triangle within a triangle, and a blank hypothenuse. This is where some things get slightly complex, but hopefully, the visual makes things easier to grasp and fully understand.
So since the total distance was 6.6 inches, and I know that the box was 3 inches, I now can simply subtract the 3 from 6.6 and get the actual distance between the object and my camera, which was 3.3 inches. Now to demonstrate that the course isn't all just science, I'll throw in a calculation for the hypothenuse, which is shown through visuals on the right. Remember how I measure the heights of the pinhole and the object of focus (which is indeed a stone grim reaper skull), well using the height of my object, and know the complete length of my box + the distance, I can tell you just how far the light would have to travel. So using the simple Pythagorean Theorem, which is "a^2+b^2=c^2" thus 6 squared (36) + 6.6 squared (43.56) = 79.56. Since c is squared, we find the square root of our answer, which is about 8.9. The light would travel those 8.9 inches (which is 0.22606 meters, which we'll divide by 300 million since that's the approximate speed of light in meters) in roughly a ten millionth of a second. Yeah it's pretty much instantaneous, however theoretically, there is a delay of sorts.Now in regards to the actual box, well the inside of it is all black and of course, it's completely covered. This is because the color black is when a surface absorbs all manner of light, whereas color itself is just a mix of the reflected light that we see coming to us. Something that's red is reflecting red, absorbing green and blue, that's how it works. This was a tough thing to actually 100% complete as paint on cardboard has quite an odd consistency, if you can call it that. Now, with the pinhole, the best results were using an aluminum can as somewhat of a lens, and a minuscule hole (aptly name pinhole as I'm sure you've figured) so the light only goes through that space. Something else to mention is the shutter. Now, shutter speed might be a familiar term to any of you photographers out there, but to those of you who may not know, conventional cameras don't snap something and then create a picture, they have a shutter, something that blocks in the light and only allows it to come through when the user desires to capture a moment. Shutter speed is essentially a wall that has a moving slit, therefore, if something moves during that moment of the shutter sliding through, it'll have a great obstruction of even a fancy illusion. It depends on how you look at it. My shutter speed lasted for 3 minutes, so that would calculate to it take 1 picture every 180 seconds, which can be advantageous for more surreal shots, or in a scenario like this where you're required to have an extended exposure. Most conventional shutter speeds are a literal fraction of a second, dwelling all the way down to an insanely fast ten thousandth of a second, which is truly outstanding when you think about that from a technological aspect.
Light is quite a unique thing, as it acts as both a particle and a wave, because when intersected with itself, the rays get amplified in brightness and go through each other, rather than what a particle would do since that would simply bounce off of other particles. Incidentally, light emits heat and energy called photons, which can be distributed very similarly as a particle would. Light is essentially a hybrid with it's form and with the way it acts. That's why there's the term refraction, which is a word to represent how light can bend and make an image appear altered, like a pen in a glass of water. The water obstructs the form of the pen, or rather, it seems to. That's because water changes the angle and speed of the light as it comes in. Luckily, and arguably, unfortunately, we didn't have to deal with this obstacle with our pinhole cameras, since there was nothing for the light to refract off of, giving us a clean and solid look to the photos we've taken... Assuming they developed properly.
On the bright side, the custom picture developed quite clearly, and I'm rather proud of the result. With that, I hope I've taught you something knew, or even that you simply enjoyed reading through this.
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