Camera Obscura

Around 330BC, Aristotle observed and noted the first reference to the optic laws that would later make the pinhole camera a possibility.

Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham)

Alhazen, who lived around 1000AD, invented the first pinhole camera (also called the Camera Obscura). Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) was an Arabian scientist, astronomer and mathematician, born in Basra, Iraq and lived from 965-1038.

He conducted experiments in Cairo- many of which centred on a dark room with a hole in one of the walls. On one occasion, five lanterns were adjacent to the wall containing the hole. He noticed that five lights appeared on the opposite inside wall-however, when obstructions were placed between one of the lanterns and the hole, Alhazen observed that one of the lights on the wall was no longer visible. As the lantern, obstruction and hole were in alignment, it proved that light travelled in a straight line. This led him to realise that light from the sun or another source was reflected into the eye from a person’s observations. This experiment was the first scientific description of the ‘Camera Obscura’.

Original Camera Obscura

In order to account for the fact that human beings see objects the correct way up, da Vinci put forward the suggestion that the eye had several lenses to re-invert the image. This idea was why people eventually added a lens to the Camera Obscura. Then, in 1569, a man-Daniel Barbaro, reiterated the benefits of using a lens and a mirror, and made the further improvent of adding an adjustable diaphragm for the aperture. The Camera Obscura was now a self-contained instrument.

A Camera Obscura being used in
'A Matter of  Life and Death'

Daniel Barbaro first recommended the Camera Obscura as an aid to drawing. Giovanni Battista della Porta wrote that the Camera Obscura made it ‘possible for anyone ignorant in the art of painting to draw with a pencil or pen, the image of any object whatsoever’.

A Camera Obscura featured in a highly acclaimed 1946 film, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, starring David Niven (GB 1946; 104m Technicolor- US title: Stairway to Heaven). This was inspired by a Camera Obscura installed at Portmeiron, Wales in 1922.