www.falstad.com/diffraction/
This link takes you to the site of one Paul Falstad to the applet for Fresnel Diffraction. If you select single slit, double slit, etc., you can see a visualization of the different apertures and optical effects. Its really helpful for me to see and be able to manipulate the parameters. I thought it would be interesting and educational to those who are dedicated to the art of pinhole photography. I encourage checking out the other applets that he has on his website, too.
~Liesl
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Featured Pinhole Photographer- Paul Prober
Back in 2003, Lenox Laser hosted a Pinhole Competition. The submitted pictures were all stunning- beautiful and ethereal compositions of ordinary objects seen through the magical eye of a pinhole. You can view the photographs in the Pinhole Gallery of our Lenox Laser Wiki Knowledge Base.
I would now like to go back and revisit the photographers that contributed. So the first Featured Pinhole Photographer is Paul Prober.
He submitted two photographs to the competition- "Leaving Station" and "Courthouse Back Arch." Here again are the two photos:
I personally love the trees seen through the train on "Leaving Station." And "Courthouse Back Arch" is haunting in its beauty.
Paul Prober owns his own website, www.huecandela.com where he makes and sells other pinhole photography products. He and Bill Wellman also wrote a paper "Optimum Pinhole Camera Design." You can find it on the website or read it directly here.
What do you think of these photographs? Does it inspire you to try pinhole photography? It certainly inspires me! Let us know in the comments what you think, and also if you would be interested in participating in another Pinhole Competition in the (near?) future.
And, as always, check out our website www.lenoxlaser.com to see our pinhole products and to request more information. Check back here at the blog soon for more pinhole photography stuff and featured photographers!
I would now like to go back and revisit the photographers that contributed. So the first Featured Pinhole Photographer is Paul Prober.
He submitted two photographs to the competition- "Leaving Station" and "Courthouse Back Arch." Here again are the two photos:
 |
| "Leaving Station" Paul Prober |
 |
| "Courthouse Back Arch" Paul Prober |
I personally love the trees seen through the train on "Leaving Station." And "Courthouse Back Arch" is haunting in its beauty.
Paul Prober owns his own website, www.huecandela.com where he makes and sells other pinhole photography products. He and Bill Wellman also wrote a paper "Optimum Pinhole Camera Design." You can find it on the website or read it directly here.
What do you think of these photographs? Does it inspire you to try pinhole photography? It certainly inspires me! Let us know in the comments what you think, and also if you would be interested in participating in another Pinhole Competition in the (near?) future.
And, as always, check out our website www.lenoxlaser.com to see our pinhole products and to request more information. Check back here at the blog soon for more pinhole photography stuff and featured photographers!
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Stunning Pinhole Photos by Greg MacDonald
The following images were taken with our pinholes about .008 1.0 from hole to film by Greg MacDonald. Thanks, Greg, for sharing!
 |
| Image001- Greg MacDonald |
 |
| Sacred- Greg MacDonald |
 |
| Image003- Greg MacDonald |
Thursday, December 16, 2010
NEW SERVICE PROVIDED BY LENOX LASER
In order to meet the high quality standards expected from our customers, Lenox Laser now offers a vacuum packing service to further ensure the integrity of manufactured parts from our facility to their intended destination.
Vacuum packing offers a wide range of advantages especially for those parts that require certain controlled conditions, such as, moisture-free or dust-free environments. Vacuum packing also reduces part movement in transit. Part movement or improperly packaged parts compromise a part’s integrity. This service may be of interest to our international customers whose parts must travel great distances.
Whether it is a single part or several, this vacuum packing service is highly recommended for our customers in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor and optical industries.
Call 1-800-49HOLES (4-6537) or email sales@lenoxlaser.com for more information. Be sure to visit our website at www.lenoxlaser.com to view our line of parts and services.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
My First Encounter with Pinhole Photography
Being a new face at Lenox Laser, Inc of Glenarm, MD, I was fascinated by the world’s range of precision hole needs, but I did not quite understand all their applications. So I began my self education with PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY. I figured I had a passing acquaintance with photography, even if only of the “point and shoot” variety.
Boy, was I wrong.
First I discovered that PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY was invented centuries ago when man discovered that light passing through a tiny hole produced an image of the object on the surface it fell on. The earliest documentation of this discovery comes from the Chinese in the 5th century B.C., and was later expanded upon in the writings of Aristotle.
I found that the first published picture of a pinhole camera obscura was found in a drawing in 1545 by Gemma Frisius, an astronomer, who used the pinhole in his darkened room to study the solar eclipse of 1544. The term camera obscura describing a "dark room" was coined later by Johannes Kepler.
Then, Sir David Brewster a Scottish scientist was one of the first to make pinhole photographs in the 1850s. He was also the first to use the word "pinhole". The Nobel Prize winner, Lord Rayleigh, researched pinholes in the 1880s to achieve the optimal pinhole formulas still used by scientists today
So I learned that Pinhole Photography is unique in that it can require nothing elaborate or expensive in its simplest form and has been around for centuries. It needs no lens as normal photography does and can be made from cardboard or such with a hole in it. Like:
Boy, was I wrong.
First I discovered that PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY was invented centuries ago when man discovered that light passing through a tiny hole produced an image of the object on the surface it fell on. The earliest documentation of this discovery comes from the Chinese in the 5th century B.C., and was later expanded upon in the writings of Aristotle.
I found that the first published picture of a pinhole camera obscura was found in a drawing in 1545 by Gemma Frisius, an astronomer, who used the pinhole in his darkened room to study the solar eclipse of 1544. The term camera obscura describing a "dark room" was coined later by Johannes Kepler.
Then, Sir David Brewster a Scottish scientist was one of the first to make pinhole photographs in the 1850s. He was also the first to use the word "pinhole". The Nobel Prize winner, Lord Rayleigh, researched pinholes in the 1880s to achieve the optimal pinhole formulas still used by scientists today
So I learned that Pinhole Photography is unique in that it can require nothing elaborate or expensive in its simplest form and has been around for centuries. It needs no lens as normal photography does and can be made from cardboard or such with a hole in it. Like:
Light rays bounce off the image in a small and precise way through the hole and form a reverse image on a slip of paper or film. These cameras are usually handmade. Basically, the pinhole camera consists of a light tight box with a pinhole in one end, and a piece of film or photographic paper attached to the other end. A shutter devise can be a piece of paper or cardboard that can be folded out of the way as needed. The pinhole can be made by using a sewing needle or small nail through a piece of foil or the like. Remember, the more perfect the hole and the tinier the hole, the better the picture will be. This piece is then applied to the inside of the light tight box behind a hole cut through the box. An oatmeal box can be made into an excellent pinhole camera, but should be covered in foil to be light free. Sometimes Pinhole cameras are made with a movable film holder or back so that the space between the film and the pinhole can be adjusted, allowing the angle view of the camera to be changed. Moving the film closer to the pinhole can give you a wider angle view and a different picture.
So now I was more familiar with the Pinhole Concept, but putting it to practical use seemed to take some creativity and skill. Something I’m not so into. Did I mention, I was the “point and shoot” type? So maybe it only requires purchasing the proper equipment. Depending on how crafty you are and how professional and serious you are about the results.
At Lenox Laser, they make it easy for Pinhole Photographers to get laser-drilled pinhole quality (remember the tinier and the more perfect the hole, the better the picture) in a new line of practical SLR pinhole conversion products for standard 35mm cameras, a customer driven concept built by our R&D team.
Its’ simple, using the classic 35mm SLR camera format, Lenox Laser SLR Pinhole Kits can now easily outfit your Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Canon, or Minolta camera with another lens in your arsenal, a pinhole designed for your specific camera. Lenox Laser online calculator’s page offers an array of pinhole calculators to aid your photographic efforts in finding correct exposure times, f-stops, and proper pinhole sizes. Currently, we offer PC, Mac, Palm, and Web-based pinhole calculators.
REFERENCES/LINKS:
http://photo.net/learn/pinhole/pinhole
www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/.../pinholeCamera/
www.spiritus-temporis.com/pinhole-camera/pinhole-camera-construction
www.spiritus-temporis.com/pinhole-camera/pinhole-camera-construction
www.video-surveillance-guide.com/pinhole-camera-history.htm
www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera
www.exploratorium.edu/science.../pringles_pinhole.html
Thursday, December 11, 2008
X-ray Holography
BERKELEY, CA – The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than previous x-ray-holographic methods.
Press release image A coherent x-ray beam illuminates both the sample and a uniformly redundant array (URA) placed next to it. The CCD detector (whose center is shielded from the direct beam) collects diffracted x-rays from both sample and URA. Processing the resulting interference patterns subsequently yields a hologram.
The x-ray hologram made at ALS beamline 9.0.1 was of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, “Vitruvian Man,” a lithographic reproduction less than two micrometers (millionths of a meter, or microns) square, etched with an electron-beam nanowriter. The hologram required a five-second exposure and had a resolution of 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter).
The other hologram, made at FLASH, was of a single bacterium, Spiroplasma milliferum, made at 150-nanometer resolution and computer-refined to 75 nanometers, but requiring an exposure to the beam of just 15 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second).
The values for these two holograms are among the best ever reported for micron-sized objects. With already established technologies, resolutions obtained by these methods could be pushed to only a few nanometers, or, using computer refinement, even better.
The researchers were from Berkeley Lab; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Uppsala University, Sweden; the University of Hamburg and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Germany; Arizona State University; Princeton University; and the University of California at Berkeley. Their results appear in advanced online publication of Nature Photonics, available online to subscribers at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nphoton.2008.154.
The modern pinhole camera
“Our purpose was to explore methods of making images of nanoscale objects on the time scale of atomic motions, a length and time regime that promises to become accessible with advances in free-electron lasers,” says Stefano Marchesini of the ALS, who led the research. “The technique we used is called massively parallel x-ray Fourier-transform holography, with ‘coded apertures.’ What inspired me to try this approach was the pinhole camera.”
The ancient Greeks made note of pinhole-camera effects without understanding them; later, pinhole cameras were used by Chinese, Arab, and European scholars. Renaissance painters learned the principals of perspective using the camera obscura, literally a “dark room,” with a pinhole in one wall that projected the outside scene onto the opposite wall.
“The room had to be dark for the good reason that a sharp image requires a small pinhole, but a small pinhole also produces a dim image,” says Marchesini. “To get a brighter image without lenses you have to use many pinholes. The problem then becomes how to assemble the information, including depth information, from the overlapping shadow images. This is where ‘coded apertures’ come in.”
By knowing the precise layout of a pinhole array, including the different sizes of the different pinholes, a computer can recover a bright, high-resolution image numerically. Random pinhole arrays were first used in x-ray astronomy but soon evolved into regular rows and columns of tiny square apertures of varying dimension. These coded apertures are called uniformly redundant arrays, or URAs.
Marchesini knew that colleagues at Livermore were using URAs in gamma-ray detectors. He asked himself, “What would happen if we put a URA right next to an object we were imaging with the x-ray beamline? It should allow us to create a holographic image – one with orders of magnitude more intensity than a standard hologram.”
Holography with x-rays
Holography was invented over 60 years ago by the physicist Dennis Gabor, but its use has long been limited by technology. Whereas a pinhole camera employs ray optics, in which the photons travel like a stream of particles, holography depends on the wave-like properties of light.
The principle is straightforward: a beam of light illuminates an object, which scatters the light onto a detector such as a photographic plate. Meanwhile a second, identical beam of light shines directly on the detector. The scattered light waves from the object beam form interference patterns with the unscattered light waves from the reference beam.
This interference pattern serves to reconstruct an image of the object. One easy way to do so, if the detector is a photo transparency, is for the observer to look through the transparency in the direction of the (now absent) object; if only the reference beam is shining on the detector, the interference pattern serves to “unscatter” (diffract) the wavefront and reconstruct the object’s image.
Lasers, which produce coherent light (all the same phase) were the first invention that made holography practical; it is now possible to make small holograms using just a laser pointer. FLASH is a powerful free-electron laser (FEL); a new generation of FELs of much shorter wavelength will be capable of producing coherent light pulses so short they’ll be able to freeze atomic motion in the midst of chemical reactions.
Soft x-rays like those from ALS beamline 9.0.1 can also be made coherent, or laser-like, using a pair of pinholes. (The beam is conditioned by these pinholes, but they are not directly involved in imaging, except to make the beam laser-like.) To make a hologram, the beam issuing from the synchrotron scatters from the target object and is collected on a CCD detector. Meanwhile the same beam simultaneously passes through the multiple-“pinhole” URA, mounted on the same plate as the target object, and produces a bright reference beam.
Press release image Top: the ALS beamline 9.0.1 experiment used a uniformly redundant array (URA) 30 nanometers thick with scattering elements 44 nanometers square (left). At right is the lithograph of Da Vinci�s Vitruvian Man. The scale bar is two micrometers long. Bottom: the FLASH experiment used a URA with 162 pinholes, next to a Spiroplasma bacterium. The 150-nanometer diameter pinholes in the URA limited resolution, but computer processing improved image resolution to 75 nanometers. The scale bar is four micrometers long.
The scattered image of the object and the many overlapping reference beams from the URA combine to make an interference pattern which contains all the information, including the relative depth of individual features, needed to mathematically reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the object.
The hologram of the Spiroplasma bacterium was made in precisely the same way, with much brighter x-ray beams and a much shorter pulse of light. So bright was the flash of light that the sample was vaporized, but not before both the scattered object beam and the reference beams from the URA had been recorded.
Together, the two experiments demonstrate that holographic x-ray images with nanometer-scale resolution can be made of objects measured in microns, in times as brief as femtoseconds. Moreover, sample preparation time is fast and easily repeated for high throughput during repetitive experiments. As the researchers write in their Nature Photonics article, “Imaging with coherent x-rays will be a key technique for developing nanoscience and nanotechnology, and massively parallel holography will be an enabling tool in this quest.”
“Massively parallel x-ray holography,” by Stefano Marchesini, Sébastien Boutet, Anne E. Sakdinawat, Michael J. Bogan, Sǎsa Bajt, Anton Barty, Henry N. Chapman, Matthias Frank, Stefan P. Hau-Riege, Abraham Szöke, Congwu Cui, David Shapiro, Malcolm Howells, John Spence, Joshua Shaevitz, Joanna Lee, Janos Hajdu, and Marvin M. Siebert, appears in advanced online publication of Nature Photonics and is available online to subscribers at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nphoton.2008.154.
This work was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, the European Union, the Swedish Research Councils, the Munich Centre for Advanced Photonics, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Sven and Lilly Lawskis Foundation.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California.
Press release image A coherent x-ray beam illuminates both the sample and a uniformly redundant array (URA) placed next to it. The CCD detector (whose center is shielded from the direct beam) collects diffracted x-rays from both sample and URA. Processing the resulting interference patterns subsequently yields a hologram.
The x-ray hologram made at ALS beamline 9.0.1 was of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, “Vitruvian Man,” a lithographic reproduction less than two micrometers (millionths of a meter, or microns) square, etched with an electron-beam nanowriter. The hologram required a five-second exposure and had a resolution of 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter).
The other hologram, made at FLASH, was of a single bacterium, Spiroplasma milliferum, made at 150-nanometer resolution and computer-refined to 75 nanometers, but requiring an exposure to the beam of just 15 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second).
The values for these two holograms are among the best ever reported for micron-sized objects. With already established technologies, resolutions obtained by these methods could be pushed to only a few nanometers, or, using computer refinement, even better.
The researchers were from Berkeley Lab; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Uppsala University, Sweden; the University of Hamburg and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Germany; Arizona State University; Princeton University; and the University of California at Berkeley. Their results appear in advanced online publication of Nature Photonics, available online to subscribers at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nphoton.2008.154.
The modern pinhole camera
“Our purpose was to explore methods of making images of nanoscale objects on the time scale of atomic motions, a length and time regime that promises to become accessible with advances in free-electron lasers,” says Stefano Marchesini of the ALS, who led the research. “The technique we used is called massively parallel x-ray Fourier-transform holography, with ‘coded apertures.’ What inspired me to try this approach was the pinhole camera.”
The ancient Greeks made note of pinhole-camera effects without understanding them; later, pinhole cameras were used by Chinese, Arab, and European scholars. Renaissance painters learned the principals of perspective using the camera obscura, literally a “dark room,” with a pinhole in one wall that projected the outside scene onto the opposite wall.
“The room had to be dark for the good reason that a sharp image requires a small pinhole, but a small pinhole also produces a dim image,” says Marchesini. “To get a brighter image without lenses you have to use many pinholes. The problem then becomes how to assemble the information, including depth information, from the overlapping shadow images. This is where ‘coded apertures’ come in.”
By knowing the precise layout of a pinhole array, including the different sizes of the different pinholes, a computer can recover a bright, high-resolution image numerically. Random pinhole arrays were first used in x-ray astronomy but soon evolved into regular rows and columns of tiny square apertures of varying dimension. These coded apertures are called uniformly redundant arrays, or URAs.
Marchesini knew that colleagues at Livermore were using URAs in gamma-ray detectors. He asked himself, “What would happen if we put a URA right next to an object we were imaging with the x-ray beamline? It should allow us to create a holographic image – one with orders of magnitude more intensity than a standard hologram.”
Holography with x-rays
Holography was invented over 60 years ago by the physicist Dennis Gabor, but its use has long been limited by technology. Whereas a pinhole camera employs ray optics, in which the photons travel like a stream of particles, holography depends on the wave-like properties of light.
The principle is straightforward: a beam of light illuminates an object, which scatters the light onto a detector such as a photographic plate. Meanwhile a second, identical beam of light shines directly on the detector. The scattered light waves from the object beam form interference patterns with the unscattered light waves from the reference beam.
This interference pattern serves to reconstruct an image of the object. One easy way to do so, if the detector is a photo transparency, is for the observer to look through the transparency in the direction of the (now absent) object; if only the reference beam is shining on the detector, the interference pattern serves to “unscatter” (diffract) the wavefront and reconstruct the object’s image.
Lasers, which produce coherent light (all the same phase) were the first invention that made holography practical; it is now possible to make small holograms using just a laser pointer. FLASH is a powerful free-electron laser (FEL); a new generation of FELs of much shorter wavelength will be capable of producing coherent light pulses so short they’ll be able to freeze atomic motion in the midst of chemical reactions.
Soft x-rays like those from ALS beamline 9.0.1 can also be made coherent, or laser-like, using a pair of pinholes. (The beam is conditioned by these pinholes, but they are not directly involved in imaging, except to make the beam laser-like.) To make a hologram, the beam issuing from the synchrotron scatters from the target object and is collected on a CCD detector. Meanwhile the same beam simultaneously passes through the multiple-“pinhole” URA, mounted on the same plate as the target object, and produces a bright reference beam.
Press release image Top: the ALS beamline 9.0.1 experiment used a uniformly redundant array (URA) 30 nanometers thick with scattering elements 44 nanometers square (left). At right is the lithograph of Da Vinci�s Vitruvian Man. The scale bar is two micrometers long. Bottom: the FLASH experiment used a URA with 162 pinholes, next to a Spiroplasma bacterium. The 150-nanometer diameter pinholes in the URA limited resolution, but computer processing improved image resolution to 75 nanometers. The scale bar is four micrometers long.
The scattered image of the object and the many overlapping reference beams from the URA combine to make an interference pattern which contains all the information, including the relative depth of individual features, needed to mathematically reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the object.
The hologram of the Spiroplasma bacterium was made in precisely the same way, with much brighter x-ray beams and a much shorter pulse of light. So bright was the flash of light that the sample was vaporized, but not before both the scattered object beam and the reference beams from the URA had been recorded.
Together, the two experiments demonstrate that holographic x-ray images with nanometer-scale resolution can be made of objects measured in microns, in times as brief as femtoseconds. Moreover, sample preparation time is fast and easily repeated for high throughput during repetitive experiments. As the researchers write in their Nature Photonics article, “Imaging with coherent x-rays will be a key technique for developing nanoscience and nanotechnology, and massively parallel holography will be an enabling tool in this quest.”
“Massively parallel x-ray holography,” by Stefano Marchesini, Sébastien Boutet, Anne E. Sakdinawat, Michael J. Bogan, Sǎsa Bajt, Anton Barty, Henry N. Chapman, Matthias Frank, Stefan P. Hau-Riege, Abraham Szöke, Congwu Cui, David Shapiro, Malcolm Howells, John Spence, Joshua Shaevitz, Joanna Lee, Janos Hajdu, and Marvin M. Siebert, appears in advanced online publication of Nature Photonics and is available online to subscribers at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nphoton.2008.154.
This work was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, the European Union, the Swedish Research Councils, the Munich Centre for Advanced Photonics, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Sven and Lilly Lawskis Foundation.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Introduction to Pinhole Photography
Pinhole photography is lensless photography. Basically, a pinhole camera is a box, with a tiny hole at one end and film or photographic paper at the other.
Pinhole images are softer-less sharp- than pictures made with a lens. The images have nearly infinite depth of field. Wide angle images remain absolutely rectilinear. Pinhole images, however, suffer from greater chromatic aberration than pictures made with a simple lens and tolerate little enlargement. Exposures are long, ranging from a half a second to several hours. Images are exposed on film or paper - negative or positive, black and white, or color.
Historically, the basic principles of the pinhole were first commented on in Chinese texts from the 5th century B.C. Chinese writers had discovered by experiment that light travels in straight lines. The philosopher, Mo Ti, was aware that objects reflect light in all directions, and that rays from the top of an object, when passing through a hole, will produce the lower part of an image.
By the 4th century in the western hemisphere, Aristotle commented on pinhole image formation in his work Problems. In book XV, 6, he poses the following question: Why is it that when the sun passes through quadrilaterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular?" Aristotle found no satisfactory explanation to his observation so the problem remained unresolved until the 16th century.
In the Renaissance and later the pinhole was mainly used for scientific purposes in astronomy and, fitted with a lens, as a drawing aid for artists and amateur painters.
Leonardo da Vinci describes pinhole formation in his Codex Atlanticus and Manuscript D. These descriptions would, however, remain unknown until Venturi deciphered and published them in 1797.
The first published picture of a pinhole camera obscura is a drawing in Gemma Frisius' De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (1545). Gemma Frisius, an astronomer, had used his pinhole in a darkened room to study the solar eclipse of 1544. The very term camera obscura ("dark room") was coined by Johannes Kepler who himself invented a portable camera obscura in the 1620's.
In the 1850's, Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, was among the first to make pinhole photographs. He was the first to coin the term "pinhole" which he used in his book The Stereoscope, published in 1856. Other famous "pinholers" were Sir William Crookes, John Spiller, William de Wiveleslie Abney, and Flinders Petrie.
By the 1890's, pinhole photography had become very popular. Commercial pinhole cameras were sold in Europe, the United States and Japan. (Over 4000 pinhole cameras, called "Photomnibuses", were sold in London alone in 1892!)
Over the years, pinhole photography gave way to the mass production of cameras and what was called the "new realism". By the 1930's the technique was virtually forgotten or only used in teaching. Frederick Brehm, of what was to become the Rochester Institute of Technology, was possibly the first college professor to stress the educational value of the pinhole technique. He also designed the Kodak Pinhole Camera around 1940.
Over the next 20 years, interest in pinhole photography was sporadic at best but did see an increase in popularity in the 1970's. By the mid 1980's, Lauren Smith published The Visionary Pinhole, the first broad documentation of the diversity of pinhole photography. The first national exhibition of pinhole photography in the United States was organized by Willie Anne Wright, at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the Virginia Museum, in 1982. Eric Renner, in 1984, founded The Pinhole Resource, an international center and archive for pinhole photography.In 1988, the first international exhibition, "Through a Pinhole Darkly", was organized by the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island. For a thorough analysis of pinhole photography in the 1980's, one should read James Hugunin's essay "Notes Toward a Stenopaesthetic".
Pinhole Photography continued to be popular throughout the 1990's and into the new century as is evidenced by not only the increase in various pinhole photography publications and pinhole photography competitions but by the overwhelming popularity of the World Wide Web. Many companies, most notably, the Lenox Laser Corporation and its online distributor, Daystar Laser offer many products and professional assistance for the pinhole photographer.
Pinhole images are softer-less sharp- than pictures made with a lens. The images have nearly infinite depth of field. Wide angle images remain absolutely rectilinear. Pinhole images, however, suffer from greater chromatic aberration than pictures made with a simple lens and tolerate little enlargement. Exposures are long, ranging from a half a second to several hours. Images are exposed on film or paper - negative or positive, black and white, or color.
Historically, the basic principles of the pinhole were first commented on in Chinese texts from the 5th century B.C. Chinese writers had discovered by experiment that light travels in straight lines. The philosopher, Mo Ti, was aware that objects reflect light in all directions, and that rays from the top of an object, when passing through a hole, will produce the lower part of an image.
By the 4th century in the western hemisphere, Aristotle commented on pinhole image formation in his work Problems. In book XV, 6, he poses the following question: Why is it that when the sun passes through quadrilaterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular?" Aristotle found no satisfactory explanation to his observation so the problem remained unresolved until the 16th century.
In the Renaissance and later the pinhole was mainly used for scientific purposes in astronomy and, fitted with a lens, as a drawing aid for artists and amateur painters.
Leonardo da Vinci describes pinhole formation in his Codex Atlanticus and Manuscript D. These descriptions would, however, remain unknown until Venturi deciphered and published them in 1797.
The first published picture of a pinhole camera obscura is a drawing in Gemma Frisius' De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (1545). Gemma Frisius, an astronomer, had used his pinhole in a darkened room to study the solar eclipse of 1544. The very term camera obscura ("dark room") was coined by Johannes Kepler who himself invented a portable camera obscura in the 1620's.
In the 1850's, Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, was among the first to make pinhole photographs. He was the first to coin the term "pinhole" which he used in his book The Stereoscope, published in 1856. Other famous "pinholers" were Sir William Crookes, John Spiller, William de Wiveleslie Abney, and Flinders Petrie.
By the 1890's, pinhole photography had become very popular. Commercial pinhole cameras were sold in Europe, the United States and Japan. (Over 4000 pinhole cameras, called "Photomnibuses", were sold in London alone in 1892!)
Over the years, pinhole photography gave way to the mass production of cameras and what was called the "new realism". By the 1930's the technique was virtually forgotten or only used in teaching. Frederick Brehm, of what was to become the Rochester Institute of Technology, was possibly the first college professor to stress the educational value of the pinhole technique. He also designed the Kodak Pinhole Camera around 1940.
Over the next 20 years, interest in pinhole photography was sporadic at best but did see an increase in popularity in the 1970's. By the mid 1980's, Lauren Smith published The Visionary Pinhole, the first broad documentation of the diversity of pinhole photography. The first national exhibition of pinhole photography in the United States was organized by Willie Anne Wright, at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the Virginia Museum, in 1982. Eric Renner, in 1984, founded The Pinhole Resource, an international center and archive for pinhole photography.In 1988, the first international exhibition, "Through a Pinhole Darkly", was organized by the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island. For a thorough analysis of pinhole photography in the 1980's, one should read James Hugunin's essay "Notes Toward a Stenopaesthetic".
Pinhole Photography continued to be popular throughout the 1990's and into the new century as is evidenced by not only the increase in various pinhole photography publications and pinhole photography competitions but by the overwhelming popularity of the World Wide Web. Many companies, most notably, the Lenox Laser Corporation and its online distributor, Daystar Laser offer many products and professional assistance for the pinhole photographer.
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