- A very basic camera obscura is a device that produces an image of some of its surroundings onto a screen.
- It is used in drawing and entertainment, and its invention led to photography
- It is a box with a hole in one side, and light, bounces off a scene outside, and then passes through this hole and hits a surface inside the box , where the image is reproduced, upside down, but with color
- This idea wasn’t exactly new, because observations of this type of thing happening in daily life had been observed by the likes of Aristotle (300BC)
- The idea continued to be developed over many centuries by various inventers such as Anthemius of Tralles (6th century) who kind of developed the Hagia Sophia, and Roger Bacon (13th century) who realized it could be used for solar eclipses, and they continued to be refined and improved over hundreds of years.
- People would trace the image that was projected onto the screen, and this happened in camera obscuras that were the size of a room; technically not photography this was a start. Eventually the idea of film was incorporated into the camera obscura
- The Camera Obscura was eventually modeled into the camera like devises, and is credited with making the first photographs
- The Camera Obscura is still a style of photography used today because of the interesting images it produces
There have even been cameras, such as the hagia Sophia, that have been created with the intention of making camera obscura style photos
The above image was frequently copied in such publications as Lardner, Museum of Science and Art,1855. Note the also common irregular depiction of scale between the artist and the camera obscura.
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My Camera Obscura
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back side
front side
And last, there is a cool video of camera obscura on Youtube:
