reproduction of detail. The greater the distance
between the pinhole opening and the photo paper
or film (the focal plane), the less refined the resulting
image. This distance also affects the angle of view.
When the pinhole opening and the photo paper or
film are relatively close to each other, the resulting
angle of view is somewhat wide-angle, becoming
more and more telephoto as the hole and paper
are farther and farther apart. It is commonly
thought that lenses are responsible for improved
visual resolution but in fact the principal difference
between pinhole and lens photography has to do
with intensity not quality of light. In lens photogra-
phy, the use of optical elements concentrates multi-
ple light rays, intensifying the projected light and
shortening exposure times. In both pinhole and lens
photography, the visual resolution is more a factor
of the size of the opening than the use of a lens.
Moreover, a lens imposes the need to focus, whereas
a pinhole photograph has infinite depth of field; all
objects close or far from the pinhole camera will be
reproduced in equal focus. A flat piece of photo
paper or film placed directly across from the pinhole
opening can reproduce a scene with little visual
distortion, or diverse distortions are possible by
bending or curving the photo paper or film. Multi-
ple exposures are facilitated by the typically long
exposure times and mechanical simplicity of most
pinhole cameras.
At the end of the twentieth century, pinhole
photography was a well-published topic, a com-
mon part of many educational programs, and
exhibited in major museums as well as commercial
galleries, community centers, and libraries.
BRUCEMcKaig
Seealso:Camera Obscura; LensFurther Reading
Gernsheim, Alison, and Helmut Gernsheim.The History of
Photography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969.
International Center of Photography.Encyclopedia of Photo-
graphy. New York: Pound Press/Crown Publishers, 1984.
Renner, Eric.Pinhole Photography: Rediscovering a Historic
Technique. Boston: Focal Press, 1995.
Shull, Jim.The Hole Thing. New York: Morgan & Morgan,
1974.
Smith, Lauren.The Visionary Pinhole. USA: Peregrine
Smith, 1985.CAMERA: POINT AND SHOOT
The 35-mm film cameras known familiarly as
‘‘point and shoots’’ are not your (Great) Grand-
ma’s Brownie. They are smart, sophisticated, and
snap-shot easy miniaturizations of the classic
rangefinder cameras, scaled down to a viewing
screen to guide the eye and an interior circuitry
that automatically measures light and distance. In
the hands of a photographer who understands their
parameters, a simple model with a good lens can
take photographs indistinguishable from their lar-
ger and more complicated cousins, the single lens
reflex (SLR) and rangefinder cameras.
It took more than a hundred years of invention to
perfect cameras as small, sharp, and nearly foolproof
as the contemporary snap shot camera. Miniaturiza-
tion, however, was a goal from the beginnings of
photographic research. Henry Fox Talbot, one of
photography’s founding fathers, realized early on
in his experiments with light that tiny cameras with
lenses of short focal lengths (the distance between
the aperture and the sensitized plate) would con-
centrate the light in a small area and lead to
shorter exposures. Nicknamed ‘‘mousetraps’’ by
his wife, some of the little boxes fitted with micro-
scope lenses measured only two–and-a-half inches
square. Unfortunately, enlargers had yet to be
invented, and the tiny images were dismissed by
Fox Talbot as looking like the work ‘‘of some
Lilliputian artist.’’
The first functioning roll film camera small
enough to take on a picnic was George Eastman’s
brilliant invention, the Kodak No. 1, introduced in- It was a simple box camera less than seven
inches long and four inches wide, with a set shutter
speed of^1 = 25 of a second and a fixed focus lens that
managed a reasonably sharp picture eight feet or
more away from its subject. It came with the
instructions ‘‘You Press the Button, We Do the
CAMERA: PINHOLE