Camera Obscura is Latin for “dark room”. Try this at home. Cover all the windows in a room with black construction paper or tin foil so that absolutely no light comes in. Then turn off the lights. Poke a tiny hole in the window covering, so that the light will shine on the opposite wall. If you do this correctly, you will see a faint, upside down image of the scene outside your window on your wall. This principle is the basis upon which the science of photography is built.
In the fifth century B.C., a Chinese scholar named Mo Ti was one of the first people to note this occurrence. Aristotle (384-322 BC) understood the optical principle of the camera obscura. He viewed the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a sieve, and the gaps between leaves of a plane tree. An Arab physicist by the name of Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham) (c.965 - 1039) discovered that if you make the hole smaller, the sharper and more focused the picture became.
Reproducing the image. In the early days it was easy to reproduce the image to create a picture. You would hold a piece of paper up to the wall where the light was showing through and trace the image. This made the Camera Obscura a very important scientific tool. Scientist started building special “dark rooms” to study the events in the sky such as eclipses, phases of the moon and stars, changes in the seasons and other naturally occurring events. These tracings were so accurate and detailed that by the 1500’s people were using the Camera Obscura for painting portraits, landscapes and any other scene they wanted to record.
Further advance. Daniello Barbaro, a professor at the University of Padua, discovered in 1568 that by replacing the pinhole with a glass lens, he could bring the image into sharper, brighter focus.
Artists and scientists in the 17th century created the portable Camera obscura (dark room) so that they could study objects in the field. This basically consisted of a tent with a lens sewn into one side. The tent was a great improvement but was heavy and took time transport and to set up. To remedy this problem, they created a two foot long wooden box with a hole in one end that would project the image onto a piece of fogged glass on top of the box. Now they could just put a piece of paper on top of the glass and trace the image. This is much closer the cameras we use today. Then there’s the long journey of creating film and digital images. But that’s another story.
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