Is there anything to stop an image being projected onto the side walls in a pinhole camera/camera obscura

euclidean-geometrygeometryprojection

I always see diagrams of how a camera obscura works where the projected image neatly stops before or at the edges of the wall opposite the pinhole.

But when I look at pictures and videos of rooms converted into a camera obscura (usually as a fun experiment), the image often continues projecting onto the roof, side walls and floor. For example, there is a great picture here demonstrating this:

Walk-In Camera Obscura – Empty Kitchen

Even though we're primarily interested in the wall directly opposite the pinhole (since in a camera, that's usually where the film or sensor is) doesn't it also mean those diagrams are not entirely accurate then? Should they look less like this:

illustration showing the camera obscura image on only the opposite wall, with 1 foot of margin on the top and bottom

And more like this?:

diagram showing the camera obscura image projected a little onto the floor and ceiling

Or even like this? For I have heard in various places that the angle of view can even be as much as 180°:

diagram showing the camera obscura image covering most of the floor and ceiling

(Apologies for my crude diagrams but I think they get the point across)


(I was not sure whether Mathematics Stack Exchange was the right place for this question, but decided to post it here anyway. Apologies if this is not the right place)

Best Answer

Theoretically, yes, your version of the diagram is correct: rays that are incident to the aperture are not limited by the angle of incidence.

In practice, however, there is a limitation, namely, the thickness of the material in which the aperture is made. Rather than conceptualizing an ideal aperture as a circle in an infinitely thin plane, an actual aperture will be a cylindrical shape in a slab of some nontrivial thickness. If the incident ray is too shallow, it will not pass through the aperture. In optics, we call this phenomenon vignetting.

For a real-world camera obscura, it would therefore make sense to minimize such vignetting by making a large opening in a wall, and then place over this a thin metal plate into which the actual aperture is cut, rather than using the wall itself as the iris. But even then, the actual viewing angle can still never reach a true 180 degrees.

Moreover, the intensity of light on the imaging surface is limited by the apparent size of the aperture as viewed from that point in image space. In other words, at a shallow angle of incidence, the light projected into the room will be dimmer than for rays that are normal to the aperture.

Finally, there is a tradeoff between image brightness versus image sharpness due to diffraction. The larger the aperture, the greater the light-gathering ability. However, too large an aperture will make the image soft because the incident rays will not be restricted to a small point in object space. As the aperture size decreases, the amount of light projected onto the wall will also decrease, and the image will get sharper--but only up to a point. If the aperture decreases further, the image will get even darker but also blurrier, as diffraction of the light rays becomes apparent.

So to summarize, if we model the aperture as being made directly in the wall, the nontrivial thickness of that wall will cause vignetting of the image and the result will sort of look like the first illustration. However, if you make the iris/diaphragm out of a suitably thin material, it is possible to project a wider field of view, albeit not without limitations:

  1. The image periphery will not be as sharp as the image center
  2. The periphery will be darker than the center
  3. Depending on the aperture size, the image may be very dark or blurry.
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