Camera Obscura Essay

Camera Obscura: The History and The Process

By Katie Prigge

 Camera obscuras have existed since ancient times, using a pinhole in a dark room and the filtering in of light to trace images, but it wasn’t until the 16^th century that a telescopic lens was incorporated into the medium (Greenspun). By the 17^th century, camera obscuras had gained popularity and were used for both scientific and artistic purposes. An example of a scientific use of the camera obscura was Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who used the camera obscura to view the sun and sunspots since these were damaging to stare at directly (Borda). Camera obscuras were used to accurately map out city scenes, yet also to make images that portrayed cities as appealing and encouraged people to live there. As an art purpose, camera obscuras were used to create portraits.

            The famous portrait titled Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Verneer (1632-1675) was created with a camera obscura (Borda).  It is for this reason that the close up features of the girl’s face are soft and blurred whereas the creases in her fabric are more in focus. The camera obscura was unable to simultaneously focus on every layer of depth of the subject that Verneer was painting. Other characteristics of paintings done by artists using a camera obscura include oddly large or small hands, the edges of buildings shrink towards a vanishing point, or a ring of yellow light in the middle of the image. In landscape scenes, people were often added in later, since in real life they were moving too fast for the camera obscura to capture (Borda). Because of this they were often too large, as seen in Canaletto’s (1697-1768) Venice: the Grand Canal with S. Maria della Salute towards the Riva degli Schiavoni, where the people are equally as tall as the boats they are on.

            My original camera obscura had many problems, the most obvious being that the box was too big for my digital camera. When my digital camera was sitting in the box and took a picture it was only tall enough to capture the bottom half. Another problem was that the images in general were very faint. I fixed these problems by making an entirely new camera obscura, wrapping the outside of the box with tape multiple times to make it more light tight, and putting a piece of cardboard in the back with a hole cut out that was the size of my lens so that less light could come in from the back. The third problem was that the screen wasn’t tight enough. I fixed this in my new camera obscura by pulling on all sides of the bag before I taped it down.

Even with these adjustments, there were still some problems that were unavoidable. All of my images were most focused in the middle and gradually fanned out to be less focused. This was because the camera obscura lens was located right in the middle of the frame and wasn’t large enough to encompass the entire image with the same accuracy. Another problem was that my screen would get slightly crumpled as I moved the inner camera obscura box in and out of focus.

The aesthetics my images resemble that of Canaletto’s city scene paintings. He liked to include people and the bustling streets in his paintings because this would make a city look thriving and inviting. My second image includes a large group of people toward the bottom of the frame and my third image features a few people and cars closer up. My sixth image has the entirety of the Church of Wellington shown in the centre of the photo, which reminds me of Canaletto’s placement of the arch in View of the Arch of Constantine with the Colosseum.

 REFERENCES

 Borda, Sylvia G. "Module Excursion." University of Glasgow. Glasgow. 19 June 2015.  Lecture.

Borda, Sylvia G. "Session 1: Camera Obscura." University of Stirling. Stirling. 15 June 2015. Lecture.

Greenspun, Philip. "Learn about Photography." History of Photography Timeline. N.p., June         1999. Web. 23 June 2015. <http://photo.net/learn/history/timeline>.