build a camera obscura

When my kids were small we lived in a tiny apartment—I put up a wall of plywood between my bedroom and the large dressing room that was to become my daughters bedroom. IT made the room waytoo hot to have no ventilation so I drilled some one inch holes across the top and bottom of the wall… unbeknownst to me creating an accidental CAMERA OBSCURA on her wall!!!

Instead of a tiny little closed off room—her room became a fabulous theatre of color and light as people and cars and dogs ran by the brightly lit front widows of our house, all of this appeared on her closet wall up side down. She and her friends spent many happy hours watching this vivid “film”, most of them became artists!

Takes patience, there is really no good resource out there that covers it all. Best way to make one is to do it and keep evolving with what you learn! Here are my tips for making a giant camera obscura (about the size of a small washing machine):
1. make hole punch sized hole in a thin piece of material, like an aluminum pie plate. I at first tried a chopstick through the cardboard and that did not make a nice image. Great improvement. I think the formula I read somewhere said the aperture (hole) size should be 1/100 of the distance from the front of box to back.
2. Make a white background for image to fall upon with some nice white paper
3. Try darkening the other 3 walls by painting with poster paint or taping black plastic bags like I did, should reduce reflection from light bouncing off those walls and onto back, theoretically.
4. Make sure absolutely no light gets in. I had two holes for heads to poke in and old towels taped to the holes so that one could poke their head through without letting in light
5. Be patient. It works best outdoors and when you poke your head in it takes a while for your eyes to adjust.
6. Have a friend around who will jump around in front of the hole for you so you can have an even more surreal experience, watching an upside down “movie” of your buddy on the inside of the box! My Brownies (I did this for a camp) had a lot of fun and one even ordered from inside the box “More Dancing!” They then wanted to do handstands on the grass to see if the people inside would see them “right side up”.

So I keeo wanting to build one of these. i tried building one in a big Brooklyn loft I used to have, so I’m looking to try again in my tiny LA Studio

I did this in my bedroom about 3 years ago. I lived in a basement apartment and my bedroom had windows on only one wall. I used black posterboard and wedged it into the window frame. I didn’t want to use anything permanent since I was only renting. I cut an opening and used a large magnifying glass for the lense. I remember waking up the next sunny morning and there on the wall was a moving picture of the yard and street upside down on my wall. I was so excited, I wanted to run outside and invite people in to see the scene. I didn’t, though. After that, I experimented with holding a white piece of paper closer to the whole and moving the paper from side to side so I could see different scenes. It was great fun. When I took down the posterboard, I made a small camera obscura from an old computer paper box. I used the same lense and the posterboard to keep out as much light as possible. I still have it. It’s cool to stand in a dark room and point it towards a light room or outside.

Or least hang out there.