The MTSU Photo Society collaborated with Vanderbilt University photography students on Friday to host a camera obscura photo demonstration on the lawn outside Peck Hall.
“The camera obscura is the most primitive form of photography. It’s simple when you break it down,” said Zoe Vecchio, president of the MTSU Photo Society. “It’s basically a wall with a small hole in it, and it will project the image that it sees through the aperture, upside down on the opposite wall.”
This technique of capturing light isn’t anything new. The camera obscura preceded the modern camera, and introduced photography as a new profession. Unlike cameras developed in the 1800s, the camera obscura had no way to permanently capture light into a photo and was mainly used for novelty in the 1700s.
A viewing box had to be created for the effect to work, and Vanderbilt professor Tamra Reynolds and her students have been hard at work.
“We spent a couple months building, designing the project. Everything was built by us at Vanderbilt,” photography major Yoshi Yano said. “We’re trying to build a camera that people can walk into and see how light works through analog photography, so that we can teach people how it works.”
It took the combined effort of MTSU and Vanderbilt photography students to assemble the camera obscura on the Peck Hall lawn.
“I’ve never done anything like this. Most of my experience has been digital, so this is a first for me,” sophomore and Photo Society officer Ruby Jacobs said. “Normally on a camera, you would move your lens to focus, but on this one you move the physical board to focus … It has a very shallow depth of field, giving it that old-school look to it.”
Students enjoyed the novelty of the camera obscura regardless of photography experience.
“It’s pretty dark in there,” sophomore Megan Cheng said. “You walk in and you see a white board, then you have to look behind the board to see the upside down projection. But it’s actually a really clear image that’s really colorful. It looks so cool.”
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