If you're ever in England and come across an old camper van with the words "Camper Obscura" splashed across the side, knock on the door and say hi to photographers Jonathan Blyth and Matthew Pontin. Since the summer of 2010, Blyth and Pontin have traveled widely around the South West of England, teaching people about photography from the rear cabin of the vehicle.
In an effort to educate the general public on the age-old art of the camera obscura, New York artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have set up a 10-foot by 10-foot walk-in version in the city's Madison Square Park.
Surrounded by the Flatiron District, the installation offers an inverted look at the neighborhood, as well as the opportunity to learn a little bit about photography's roots.
We've shared several articles featuring the camera obscura and the many uses it has been put through over the years. From a roaming camera obscura used for photography workshops, to the possibility that some of painting's greatest names used them as an aid, the "technology" has really gotten around.
We've even shared videos and kits you can use to turn any windowed room in your house or apartment into your very own camera obscura. But what happens when a professional photographer grapples with the concept? If Cuban-born photographer Abelardo Morell is any indication, some pretty amazing inverted landscapes.
Did you know that some of the most famous master painters from centuries past may have actually used camera "technology" to aid them in creating their masterpieces? According to the hotly debated Hockney-Falco thesis, some well-known artists likely used rudimentary camera obscura rooms as a tool -- essentially "tracing" parts of their work.
The camera obscura has been around for a long time (Middle Ages long) and typically consisted of a box or room with a hole in one side through which an image of its surroundings could be formed. As you can see from the example above, any room -- in this case a bathroom -- can be turned into a camera obscura given a small enough "aperture." Unfortunately, most rooms have big, blaring windows that let in too much light, and the only image formed on the opposite wall is a shadowy blob.
In the name of forensics, however, Antonio Torralba and William Freeman from MIT have discovered a technique by which they can turn any windowed room into a camera obscura, using a couple of stills of the room to magically gather an image of the outside world.
Artist Chris Fraser creates beautiful light displays by turning rooms into giant camera obscuras. Rather than use a single pinhole as the lens, he bores numerous holes into the walls to create layered patterns of light. He writes,
My light installations use the ‘camera obscura’ as a point of departure. They are immersive optical environments, idealized spaces with discreet openings. In translating the outside world into moving fields of light and color, the projections make an argument for unfixed notion of sight.
If you went outdoors to observe the solar eclipse yesterday, you might have noticed that the shadows cast by trees had suddenly become quite strange. The tiny gaps between leaves act as pinhole lenses, projecting crescent shaped images of the eclipsed sun onto the world below.
Los Angeles-based photographer Ian Ruhter creates amazing photographs using a van that he turned into a gigantic camera. He uses the collodion process (AKA wet plate photography) to turn large sheets of metal into photographs, and spends upwards of $500 making each giant one-of-a-kind print.
Want to turn your room into giant camera obscura? Photographer …
National Geographic created this nifty little video teaching how to turn any room with a view into a giant …
Meet the Roulot’ographe, a Luxembourg-based mobile trailer that doubles as both a giant …
If you're ever in beautiful San Francisco, you might want to pay a visit to the giant camera obscura, a room sized "camera" built in 1946 and based on a 15th century design by Leonardo da Vinci. It's designed to look like someone left a giant 35mm there with its lens pointed to the sky.