In the fifth century B.C., the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti noted the 'image-making properties' of a small aperture, although it was not instrumentalized. Almost certainly the device itself "was formulized from optical principles that had been accidentally discovered centuries earlier and that are as old as light itself. It is impossible to know by whom or when the camera obscura was first theorized. Those who were initially interested in the device were not only scientists (natural philosophers) but philosophers or inventors-but, until the mid-1600s, as far as we know, never practicing artists. The discovery and development of camera obscura stands at the crossroads of astronomy, perspective, optics, philosophy, 2 magic and art.
The first phenomenon is due to the laws of optics while the second is due to the necessarily reduced size of the camera’s aperture. A person entering the darkened room must wait a few minutes for his eyes to become accustomed before he can make sense out the projected image. The image of the camera obscura has particular properties which makes it quite different from both reality and the photograph: its image is projected upside down, reversed left to right, and its luminosity is very low. 6 Engraving of a "portable" camera obscura in Athanasius Kircher's Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae (1645) As will become abundantly clear, there are two types of camera obscura: the camera with an internal observer, which can be either stationary or mobile, and the camera obscura with an external observer, which is always mobile.įig. 5 & 6) and later into small boxes that could be carried under ones arms. In later years the room was transformed into a large, portable box (fig. 1 & 2)." 1 The surroundings of the projected image must be dark for the image to be clear, so the first historical camera obscura experiments were performed in dark rooms with a small hole bored into one of its walls (fig. In a camera obscura the rays of light from an observed scene pass through a small aperture in one side of a closed room in such a way (following the laws of optics) as to cross and re-emerge on the other side of the aperture in a divergent configuration (fig.
"The principle of the camera obscura is as simple as it seems magical even today.
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