What Is a Pinhole Camera?

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni. I'm a professional photographer from Austin, Texas. I'm going to talk about pinhole cameras and what a pinhole really does in a camera. Pinhole is essentially your aperture and what you're doing is you can do it a few different ways. You can make a pinhole, some people call them a zone plate, out of a piece of aluminum, a piece of medal, and what you're doing is essentially what the name is. You're putting a tiny little hole into that piece of metal and you're, in this camera, I'm replacing the shutter with that pinhole. Now pinholes are a pretty fascinating camera and if you think about it, really you can make a pinhole camera out of just about anything. I've seen people make pinhole cameras out of brooms in apartment buildings. I've seen people create pinhole cameras out of UHaul trucks. Also I've seen someone actually make a pinhole camera using the aperture with their mouth and they had a piece of film at the back of their mouth. I wouldn't recommend people do that, but I have seen all these things done, and what that is is it's actually science. It's the light from the outside world coming into a darkened room, essentially it's camera obscura and making an image backward and upside down. That is how people started, a long time ago, learning how to draw that way. These were tools. This is history of photography what I'm talking about. But it is fascinating to me to learn about optics in this way. So what I did is I took an old enlarger lens that has no shutter and so this is why I have to use the tape. That's what I'm going to use essentially to make my exposure. Now a lot of this is playing around. This is just guessing. This is, for me, it's fun with photography. When I'm working my day to day jobs photography is fun but it's work. This to me is more about experimenting and just seeing what comes out. Letting my hair down. You know, it's why I still have a passion for photography. So that's what I'm going to use and if you look at the back of the camera this is where my film is going to go and my image is going to come onto my film. It's going to be placed there, and this is Polaroid film. So I'm going to see quickly whether I have something. But that doesn't mean that you can't do this even with a digital camera. You can make a little pinhole aperture with your lens cap and it still looks pretty cool, but I'm going to do it with a very. You know this camera has seen better days, but I think that it can work and that's how I'm going to make a pinhole image with this camera."