Photography is often understood as a way of preserving what we see, but this experiment explores how light can produce an image before a conventional camera records it.
The experiment involved covering a window to control the amount of light entering the room. The outside, including buildings and a parking lot, appeared on the wall as a soft, inverted projection. Even though I was looking at a place I knew, it looked very different through the camera obscura. The image was blurry and hard to see clearly, unlike when I looked directly out of the window. I photographed it with both my phone in automatic mode and a camera in manual mode. The phone's photograph was brighter, and the objects outside were easier to see. With the camera, I had to change settings, including the ISO, to make the image brighter and easier to read. Unlike modern cameras, which use technology to make pictures clearer, the camera obscura shows how light alone can create an image. This project helped me understand that photography is not just about taking pictures of what we see, but also about how light allows us to see and capture those images at all.