I was taking a photography class taught by acclaimed artist Lara Baladi. It was heavily focused on film photography and Lara encouraged experimentation. One of the topics we covered was the pinhole camera. It fascinated me because the pinhole camera is the most basic and pure form of photography. It does not require any lens, or focusing, or film, just a box with a hole in it and some light sensitive paper. I was also intrigued by the advantages the primitive technology gave. Everything in a pinhole camera's field of view is in focus without having a lens to focus it. What that means is that you can capture a picture that is beyond the limitations of modern lens technology. For instance, you can take wide angle shots without any edge distortion. I took this idea to the extreme and made my project to create a hemispherical pinhole camera that could take 180 degree field of view pictures. You could then display the spherical images and immerse yourself in the image like an analog VR.
The body of the hemispherical camera was made of paper mache because I could easily do a layup on a large balloon. I knew I wanted this camera to be big, to take big beautiful images, and the biggest balloon I could find was 3 ft in diameter so that determined the size. The paper mache gave a very durable body though it was pretty floppy. To fix that, I made a ring out of wood of slightly smaller inner diameter and pressed it around the edge and tapped it in place as a support (kinda ended up looking like Saturn). I then flipped it over and tapped the opening onto a large piece of black foam core with gaffers tape. The camera was spray painted black to prevent any light from passing through the thin walls.
I created the pinhole in small piece of sheet metal which I tapped over an opening in the foam core. A small piece of tape acted as my shutter and I would just have to remove it to begin taking a picture. Since the aperture was so small, about 1 mm, and the focal length was so large, about 1.5 ft, the camera had an f-stop of almost f/500! That meant I needed very long exposure times, usually multiple hours depending on the light. A subject in direct sunlight took about 20 mins, while indoors was around 6 hours.
After some trial and error, I ended up with a couple pretty cool pictures. The first is a picture of the big dome at MIT as seen from Killian Court. Although much the grass and trees are underexposed, the building shows up really well and I kinda like the silhouette effect.
The second picture is of the MIT Media Lab. The exposure on it took about an hour and what's great about long exposures is that you don't have to worry about pedestrians ruining your shot. The path outside the building was bustling with people but none of them stood still long enough to show up in the picture. Overall, I think the exposure is slightly better as you can see detail even in the ground, and I experimented with different ways of laying the photosensitive paper inside the camera.
The goal of getting a full 180 degree image was not achieved but there is definitely promise in this technique. And the large images looked spectacular, especially in person.