This image of a lamp in our living room, with a bulb that simulates a real flame I found at Home Depot, may look, well...crappy. It's out of focus, the colors are desaturated, and it's riddled with black specks. The quality is simply not up to par with modern standards, and with good reason. The basic method of this type of photography dates back to the 5th Century BC. This image was taken using a pinhole camera, where I replaced lenses of precision cut glass elements with a simple opaque plate with a tiny pinhole at the center. The physics behind it might be complicated, but the idea is simple. Think of a camera as a dark sealed box with some sort of light sensitive film on one side and a single small opening on the opposing side. Light from a subject moves in straight lines through the pin-point sized opening (analogous to the aperture or "f/_" of a lens) and an inverted image gets projected onto the film in the back, or in this case the digital sensor of my camera. If the opening is too big, the film or sensor will be overwhelmed with light coming in all directions, whereas a tiny opening only allows a small amount of focused light in. If you play around with different aperture settings of the same scene, say a portrait of a friend in the woods, you'll discover that a small aperture (big number like f/22) will bring the trees in the background into focus, and a big aperture (small number like f/1.8) will blur the trees into a soft wash of color. Anyway, I bring this up because apparently it's world pinhole day. Who knew? Pinhole cameras are easy to make and create an interesting "old-timey" look to photographs. Give it a try yourself.
Canon EOS 60D, NO LENS, ISO-200, f/the width of a needle point, 20 sec.
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