[HN Gopher] Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern ...
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       Watching the World in a Dark Room: The Early Modern Camera Obscura
        
       Author : prismatic
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2025-07-31 17:53 UTC (3 days ago)
        
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       | thenthenthen wrote:
       | I lived in a squat for a while and the shower was a makeshift...
       | well hose tied to the ceiling. Thats not important. There was no
       | light, so showers took place in the dark. There was a tiny hole
       | in the buildings' outer wall and it would project this
       | magnificently 'photographic' image on the wall. It was just an
       | amazing, super 'poetic' view of a parking lot. I swear I saw film
       | grain in there somehow...it was prolly the structure of the wall
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | Twenty years ago, as a tourist in Scotland, the wife and I
       | stopped at the Camera Obscura in Edinburgh. Very cool. It was
       | periscope-like -- projecting a circular image down onto a
       | circular table beneath. As you panned the periscope around the
       | image too rotated such that you had to work yourself around the
       | table to keep the horizon "level" -- relatively speaking.
       | 
       | A few months ago, in Edinburgh again on vacation, and it looks
       | like they turned what was a quaint oddity into a whole "family
       | experience" with all kinds of other things for kids and such. I
       | passed on it this time.
        
       | staplung wrote:
       | Camera obscura were _probably_ used by some painters in Europe as
       | far back as the 1500s. Evidence is sparse but there are some
       | telltale signs that are the result of characteristic distortions
       | from the mechanism. For decades, art historians have been having
       | very vigorous debates as to who might have been using them.
       | Vermeer is suspected to have done so and even da Vinci and Hans
       | Holbein are sometimes proposed.
       | 
       | Abelardo Morell took an incredibly cool picture of Times Square
       | that's projected onto the walls of a hotel room via a camera
       | obscura. Well worth a look:
       | 
       | https://aperture.org/prints/camera-obscura-image-of-times-sq...
       | 
       | And here's a video of someone experimenting with a Tudor era
       | camera obscura to do a portrait:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9cd8X2UNt4
        
       | 1659447091 wrote:
       | There is a Camera obscura scene in the AMC (?) Snowpiercer tv
       | series, I forget which episode. It's what the tailies used for
       | movie time
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-03 23:01 UTC)