PR: Make your room into a camera obscura, 2020

Right from the beginning of this virtual learning period, I thought about how I could work with students to create an academic experience that would be shared, but also personal.

In one such experience, students turned their rooms into pinhole cameras by covering windows with boxes and cutting a dime-sized hole for light to shine through. By adjusting the size of the pinhole, students learned how pinholes form images: A larger hole creates a brighter, lower-resolution image, while a smaller hole forms an image that’s crisper but dimmer. Ultimately, students used the pinhole technique to create upside-down, reversed images of the outside world, superimposed on the interior of their rooms like double exposures.

Roya Amini-Naieni, a Harvey Mudd College junior who’s majoring in mathematical and computational biology, described the pinhole experiment as “mind-blowing” and explained that Goodwin’s course has given her space to be creative and imaginative—including with projects she plans to pursue even after the semester ends. “I’m personally going to make pinhole camera curtains so that I can have a permanent pinhole camera effect in my room,” she said, adding that the process of creating these seemingly unreal photographs has been exciting. “It’s kind of like Disneyland!”

Quotes from "For Computational Photography Students, Rooms Become Cameras—and Zoom Becomes a Subject"
Scripps College News Arts and Culture