Lights, Camera, Action!

For the second STEAM course of my junior year, I'm taking a class called Light, Sound and Time. This course is giving us a chance to explore and learn how to see, hear and measure time. The first unit was focused on light and answering questions like how can we measure it? How fast does it go? And even going over what the real definition of light is. During this unit I learned that light can be both a particle and wave, depending on the situation. I also learned that light can bend, also known as refraction. For the action project, the class was assigned to build our own pinhole cameras and capture an image with it. The most challenging part for me was including the math with the project, but with the help of the teacher and some classmates, I was able to better understand it. I'm proud of how I stayed on task, and having my camera ready for the day we were going to use them.


A pinhole camera is a light-proof box without a traditional lens, but with a pinhole instead. Once you open the shutter, it's allowing light to be transferred to the photosensitive paper inside. It's important that the inside of the box is completely black, that way you won't get any light reflections. The black light does not reflect but absorbs most of it. This wouldn't be an example of refraction because the light isn't going from one medium to another. Refraction is the bending of light as it travels through different mediums.This would be an example of light equals energy because the energy (light) is letting the particles create an image with the chemicals on the photo paper. That would also be an example of particle vs wave. A lot of light waves are coming through the pinhole, so that would be an example of one part of the electromagnetic spectrum.


The object that I'm going to photograph is 25 cm tall. The height from the bottom of my camera to the pinhole is 12 cm and it's 13 cm across from the lens to the photopaper. Below, I have a drawing depicting what it would be like if I created similar triangles with those numbers, along with my calculations. I also included some pics of my camera.

RD.Calculations (2016)

RD. Pinhole camera (2016)

When we finally went to a dark room to test out our cameras, I was actually shocked with what I got. A lot of people that tested out their cameras before me, didn't really have anything show up on their photopaper, so I was a bit worried. When I finally tested it out, my shutter speed was 4 minutes. Once I went to develop it, I saw an image emerging but all I got was a checkered background. Next time I think I would place my camera a bit closer to the object I want to capture in order to actually get a full image.

RD. Pinhole camera result. (2016)

The picture below shows how the object photographed actually comes out backwards inside the camera.