The past few weeks in PLTW, my group and I have been doing the “Intro To Photography” Module where you make a pinhole camera. I never realized how easy it was to make a pinhole camera. We made it in about 20 minutes (not including time for the paint to dry), but it was still very easy. Anyone could make one at home, as long as you have these items, a round can or tube, paper, and some electrical tape. The only item you probably don’t have at home is the developer paper (film).

When we had our camera done, we went into the dark room to put film into our camera. The film could not be exposed to light so we had to work with a red light. After we put film in our camera, we closed the top, turned out the lights and went to go take the picture. We used two sticks to stabilize the camera, because a person’s hand holding it still isn’t that reliable. When we had our camera positioned in the right place, we untaped the electrical tape that cover the little pinhole we had made in the bottom on the cardboard, earlier. We exposed it for exactly a minute then covered the pinhole back up with the tape.

When we got into the dark room we turned the lights off and started to un-tape the top, to retrieve our film. We had 3 steps, and three orange containers with different liquids, to process our photo. The first box had developer in it, then water, then the fixer. Even though our first picture was totally back when we took it our of the fixer, it was still really fun to do. We figured that there was a light leak since the whole film was black. We decided to try 3 more times, and we got three good photos.

If you haven’t done this module yet, I think that you should really do it, or try making a pinhole camera yourself, because it’s really fun and interesting.