Discover the Wonder of Pinhole Photography!

Centuries ago man discovered that light passing through a tiny hole produced an image on the object or surface it fell on.  The earliest documentation of this discovery comes from the Chinese in the 5^th century B.C., and was later expanded upon in the writings of Aristotle.

Leonardo da Vinci, Rene Decartes, Albrecht Durer, and Isaac Newton all used pinholes for their research.  Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) describes pinhole image formation in his Codex Atlanticus. 

The first published picture of a pinhole camera obscura is apparently a drawing in Gemma Frisius' De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (1545). Gemma Frisius, an astronomer, had used the pinhole in his darkened room to study the solar eclipse of 1544. The term camera obscura describing a "dark room" was coined by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630).

Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, was one of the first to make pinhole photographs, in the 1850s. He also used the word "pinhole" which he used in his book The Stereoscope, published in 1856.  The Nobel Prize winner, Lord Rayleigh, researched pinholes in the 1880s to achieve the optimal pinhole formulas still used by scientists today.

For the Wikipedia article click here.