Pinhole Cameras

The great thing is that you can make a Pinhole Camera out of just about anything. Pinhole cameras have been made from shoe boxes, spam cans, mini vans, mint cans, oatmeal cans, and many more. The major thing you have to do when creating a pinhole camera is to make sure that it is completely light tight (meaning no light gets in when the shutter is closed).

Essential Questions:

-How can you turn household items into a camera?

-How can you design experiments properly to find out the effect one thing has on another?

We will be using this book as a resource: Pinhole Cameras: A DIY Guide by Chris Keeney

-Chris Keeney was our guest speaker on April 27th. He showed our students how to take pictures, develop pictures and showed us how to build all sorts of pinhole cameras. Check out some of the pictures we took on our first try with pinhole cameras.

Check out this video about the history of photography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGUL8B-BrE

Due Dates

April 27th - Pinhole Camera Expert - Chris Keeney (Author of Pinhole Cameras - A Do It Yourself Guide)

May 10th (BOC) -Quick Prezi Presentations

-Each group will present a topic concerning light

-Focus on the main point and real world applications

-Timing: between 1.5 minutes and 3 minutes.

-Images: between 3 and 5

-Real World Occurrences: at least one

May 14th (EOC) - Design and materials list for camera

-What will you be making your camera out of?

-What extra materials do you need?

-How will you ensure that it will be light tight?

-What is your focal length?

-What size pinhole do you need to make?

-What is your estimated exposure time based on your camera dimensions?

May 14th - First day for construction (do not forget your materials!)

-Those who do not have materials to build will automatically lose one full letter grade overall

May 16th - First round of test shots (9 students from each class)

-Each group will take photos into the darkroom to develop

-You only get one test shot for this round, so make it the best you can

May 17th - Critiques of test shots

May 17th - 1st draft of Experimental Design paper

-You can download the Experimental Design at the bottom of this page.

-Do Title through Procedure

-Add Positives of your Photos with an explanation of each (60 sec exposure time, cloudy day, 9:30AM)

-Write out a conclusion based on your results

May 25th - Final Draft of Experimental Design Paper Due

May 25th - Pre Final Cut for stop motion videos

June 1st - First computer draft of Magazine Page due

-Your original group will be assigned another to create a magazine page containing the information from your Prezi presentation

-Use your Photoshop skills to make your information look like a magazine

June 1st - You must have your Photo Positive on Student Shared/Wakefield/Pinhole Positives by 3:30.

-To make the positives

1-Scan the picture you took with your pinhole camera

2-Open the image in Photoshop

3-Invert the image. Image-Attributes-Invert

4-Save as a .jpeg

June 7th - Exhibition

May 3rd Project Tuning

Things needed:

-Spreadsheet for recording data

-Light tight bag for exposed, but not developed pics

-Simple, but helps understand something difficult.

-Open to different content areas

-Like having the students figuring out how each variable affects the pictures

-The data collection is the big learning

-Scientific Method is the science for the final product

-Mini Presentations on light

-Cool to see the why behind light

-Even though there is no lens in the pinhole camera, optics is good for the content

-Take apart broken cameras

-How are they built? How are they different?

-Photopaper - Photo electric effect

-Add to their blogs