Pinhole Journey

My group consists of me, Nadia, Vincent and Yinfeng. There was a lot of confusion at the start regarding how to make the camera, as well as how this whole thing really work. A couple of failed attempts and weeks of frustrations, we managed to make our prints out of this magic camera obscura!

Our first pinhole camera turned out pretty bad. We thought of being creative and making round images with the Starbucks cup lid hence we set out to purchase a bunch of materials and spray paint for the transparent Starbucks plastic cup – to the best of our knowledge, we believed the paint will cover up well…. WELL NOT QUITE. We ended up getting so many light leaks because the paint just couldn’t stick and it peeled after awhile when we tried to spray more on top of the existing paint. And what we did in the end was to wrap our “camera” with black tapes. It looks so ugly but it finally did the job – there was no light leaks since then. 

However, we encountered more issues. The images didn’t come out what we thought it would look like. All we could see was abstract art, different kind of beauty but we WANTED real images like how every other groups did. 

Therefore, we ditched our Starbucks cup and went for an old-fashioned box.

Like everyone else, we started taking photos of our beautiful school and then venturing into portraits. We kept our exposure timings between one to two and a half minutesI think we all love the portraits the most as it is so unbelievable that such a simple camera made from a box could produce our faces. Even though the details aren’t perfect, but we are recognisable! (And that’s probably what matters) Also, I was making the positives past 10 at night and I have to admit that was quite a scary experience to witness the results. We used fibre glossy photo papers for the portraits to achieve better contrast. 

Overall it was a truly fun experience to be able to travel back in time, using simple tools to create images that surprises us all the time!