Invention & History of Photography and the Camera

http://inventors.about.com

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura‎


http://www.cs-photo.com

Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) also gave the first clear description and early analysis and invented the camera obscura and pinhole camera. While Aristotle, Theon of Alexandria, Al-Kindi (Alkindus) and Chinese philosopher Mozi had earlier described the effects of a single light passing through a pinhole, none of them suggested that what is being projected onto the screen is an image of everything on the other side of the aperture. Alhazen was the first to demonstrate this with his lamp experiment where several different light sources are arranged across a large area. He was thus the first to successfully project an entire image from outdoors onto a screen indoors with the camera obscura.

In the modern age, camera obscura is often used to create experimental photography. It was still used as recently as the late 1995s by photographers such as Charles Schwartz. Large room sized camera obscuras are also created as tourist draws to large cities. Finding out how to make camera obscura is still a popular internet search.