A pinhole has been used as an optical instrument since the time of the great Egyptian scientist Ibn alHaitham (A.D. 965-1039). It evolved a few centuries later as the camera obscura, Latin for "dark chamber," which was an enclosed room with a small opening through which light passed and projected an upside down image opposite the hole. The small light opening eventually was replaced by a glass lens to improve the quality of the projected image, and the large enclosed space was honed down to a hand-holdable size: the modern day camera. However the primitive nature of the pinhole camera still has an appeal to some modern-day photographers who create their own cameras out of available materials found around the home.

A modern-day conventional camera has a lens through which light passes. A pinhole camera does not have a lens, but merely a tiny hole through which light passes into a light-tight box projecting an image. The light-tight box can be created from many different containers - metal coffee cans, cardboard oatmeal boxes, thick cardboard gift boxes, old suitcases, matchboxes, etc. The resulting image from a pinhole camera usually has many imperfections - distorted angles, dissected forms, inconsistent contrast areas from 2 -3 minute long exposure times, dust spots from particles floating in the box, and a few other oddities. I enjoy these distortions and try to manipulate them with multiple pinholes in the box. The most successful of these attempts has been a pinhole camera that I created to capture a 360-degree view outside of the box.