Pinhole Camera Images, Technique 2

The two photos (below) show a pinhole camera, which is made from a 24 ounce beer can, near the peak of the roof at the front of my house and a similar camera by the roof eves in the back of my house.

The photo (below) shows a pinhole camera mounted vertically on the fence and another one mounted horizontally on the tree.

The two exposures (below) show the sun paths over 182 days as seen from the back of my house, with the hill behind my house in the foreground, and then as seen from the front of my house. The front view looks down a street that curves slightly. The back view is taken with a vertical camera and the front view is from a horizontal camera. Notice the solar paths project differently in cameras that have a different orientation.

The two images below show two views of two vertical cameras and one horizontal camera mounted beneath the eves of my home, all of which are pointing south for the view over the roof of my neighbors's home. These images are followed by the picture taken by the vertical camera and then the picture taken by the horizontal camera.

The above two images, removed from the side-by-side vertical and horizontal cameras on 23 December 2018, show the same solar paths over the same rooftop scene -- the only difference being the orientation of the cameras. The surprisingly large differences in the resulting images are due to the fact that the photographic paper is curled into about 3/4 of a complete cylinder within each can, and then exposed to the moving sun for a half-year, so the resulting solar paths are projected onto the non-plane surface of the curved photographic paper.

The pinhole camera image below shows 182 solar tracks with many reflected by the water in our swimming pool, as well as the "normal" view of the same scene.

This view (below) of the eastern horizon shows the solar paths reflected by the surface of the water in the swimming pool, as compared to the normal view of the eastern horizon with the swimming pool in the foreground.

The image below is a ground-level pinhole image of the sun rising over the foothill that forms my eastern horizon in the back of my home. With a pinhole camera, the depth of field is infinite and uniform throughout, so the stones in the garden directly in front of the beer can camera are in as sharp a focus as the distant foothill and the sun beyond that hill.

Below is a pinhole image of a much more restricted view with 182 solar paths, as well as the pinhole camera that took the picture. Notice that the larger distance between the front pinhole end and the rear photo-paper end creates the greater enlargement at a more restricted field. Also notice that the photo paper had to be trimmed to a circle to accommodate the shape of the plastic pipe that I made into this pinhole camera. This image, unlike all other images on this web page, is formed on a plane (non-curved) piece of photographic paper, so the image is not distorted by the curve of the photographic paper.