By: Jazmin M.

Building a Pinhole Camera

This week in my PLTW, my group and I started the photography module! For this module my partners and I had to build a pinhole camera and doing that we also learned how it worked. The materials we used to build the pinhole camera were:

~ Cardboard (Like a box)

~ Aluminum Foil

~ Tape & some glue

~ Black paper (for the inside to prevent any reflections from the light)

~ & of course Photographic Paper (for when you were ready to take your pictures)

The first thought that came into my head was “how in the world are we going to build a camera (that actually works) out of only cardboard!” But after reading some instructions building the camera was not that hard after all. When the camera was done my group and I were really excited to start taking pictures and see how we had done with the camera. We spend a whole class period working in and out of the dark room. In the dark room we put the photographic paper inside the camera and closed the camera tightly so that no light got in the camera. We went outside uncovered the whole and waited for 15 seconds then covered the hole again. We went back to the dark room and processed the picture. Taking the pictures was really challenging for my group and I, we tried like a million times for at least a decent picture to come out. At the end we just chose the one we thought was best (most of the came all black! too much light) this was the picture we decided to keep:

In this module we also learned and discussed about the importance of photography and how it impacts our daily life. Photography can hold memories, history, stories emotions and feelings. Every photo has story, you just have to seek for it. I guess only my group will see the story in this image (the struggle we had trying to get a decent picture!)
Overall this module was really fun and we also learned a bunch on how these pinhole cameras work. I would definitely build another one and try to do a better camera to get some better looking pictures 🙂
Anyways thanks for reading!