Experiments with Pinhole Cameras

I attended a really interested workshop at the Massachusetts Art Educators Association Conference in November on creating pinhole cameras from discarded soda cans.  I have always been interested in making these with students but wrongly assumed I needed a darkroom to develop the images.

Instead , students loaded the cameras with light sensitive paper and set them out for a minimum of 3 days. We ‘exposed’ them by scanning them and inverting the images in Photoshop. The bright arc of light you see in some of the images is the path of the sun over several days!!

We created a makeshift 'darkroom' with a stool and some industrial size garbage bags over them. We used a red led light strip inside so we could see what we were doing when we loaded the cameras with the light sensitive paper.

My Digital Photography students all made a pinhole camera, but some students in other classes were curious and made them too.

Enjoy!