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The Pinhole Camera
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From The Physics Teacher, December, 1989
Converted to HTML by Pinhole Visions, 1999 |
Imaging without Lenses or Mirrors
By Matt Young
I like to imagine that the pinhole camera was
the third imaging system invented. First was the window, which is perhaps half-a-million
years old and was invented for looking through walls. (This is the origin of the old joke,
"Did you hear of the person who invented a device for looking through walls?'
"No, what is it called?"...) The plane mirror was, I assume, invented just after
the beginning of the bronze age, about 6000 years ago. A little reflection will show that
its function was for looking at yourself. If modern practice is anything to go by, the
inventor was a teenager.
The Greeks apparently understood the principle of the pinhole camera and developed
convex mirrors and burning glasses as well. The Greeks, however, are not remembered for
their ability to putter around, so the pinhole camera waited in the wings for almost 1500
years. Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), whom D.J. Lovell 1 called the
greatest authority on optics in the Middle Ages, lived around + 1000 on the Gregorian
calendar, invented the pinhole camera, and explained why the image was upside down. He
also studied the optics of the eye and used the Arabic word for lentil to describe the
lens of the eye. Indirectly, therefore, he gave us the modern English word, lens, which is
the Latin word for lentil.
Leonardo da Vinci may have used the pinhole camera in the 1500s for his studies of
perspective. 2 Around 1600, Della Porta reinvented the pinhole
camera. 3 Apparently he was the first European to publish any
information on the pinhole camera and is sometimes incorrectly credited with its
invention. Della Porta's pinhole camera was a large, dark room with a fairly sizeable hole
in one wall. He may have coined the term camera obscura, which is Latin for dark room. Our
English word camera, therefore, derives from the Latin word for room or chamber. Della
Porta also enlarged the hole and used lenses to cast a sharper, brighter image, though he
was probably not the first to use lenses in this way.
Despite its antiquity and apparent simplicity, the pinhole camera offers several
advantages over lens optics, particularly when resolution is not especially important.
These include
- complete freedom from linear distortion
- depth of field from a few centimeters to infinity
- wide angular field
The pinhole's light-gathering ability is poor, but this is largely offset by the high
sensitivity of modern films and television cameras. In addition, pinholes can be used in
the ultraviolet and x-ray regions of the spectrum when reflecting or refracting materials
are not readily available.
Within the last 20 years or so, the pinhole camera has been used to image x-rays, to
provide great depth of field in a flight simulator, to produce multiple images for
integrated circuit masks, for fine art photography, and to help certain scientists keep
their families well fed. In addition, a few years ago a small company marketed a pinhole
camera that used real photographic film. The camera was called the PinZip, on the notion
that the photons go "Zip" as they pass through the pinhole and hit the film.
There is now a Pinhole Journal 4 and also a book on pinhole
"fotografy." 5 I take it that you are supposed to
pronounce fotografy differently from photography, but I haven't quite mastered the sounds
yet.
Practical Pinhole Cameras
The classic pinhole camera is made by taping a sheet of 4 x 5- or 8 x 10-in film to the
inside of a certain kind of cylindrical oatmeal box whose manufacturer's name the National
Institute of Standards and Technology's policy forbids me to print. In any case, the film
is taped to the cylindrical part of the box, not the ends, and a hole is punched into the
cylinder opposite the film. The box is taped shut, and the camera is ready. Purists will
use no other kind of pinhole camera, even though the curved film plane causes distortion.
You can also make a pinhole camera out of a single-lens reflex camera body and a
cardboard tube or, if you want to get fancy, a set of extension tubes. You'll have to
cover your head with a black cloth or use an old-fashioned camera with a sports finder,
because it is hard to see anything on the viewing screen. A 100-mm focal length is
convenient and corresponds to a "telephoto" lens in normal photography. The
corresponding pinhole diameter is about 0.5 mm and is very easily punched into 50-µm
(0.002-in) brass shim stock. Place the shim stock on top of a sheet of corrugated
cardboard. Take a sharp, 0.5-mm sewing needle and tap it gently with a small tool until it
pierces the brass. Grasp the needle between your thumb and forefinger, rotate it, and
force it through the brass. (With practice, you can manufacture holes under about 0.2 mm.
See Reference 6 for information about an array of precisely sized, 25-µm
pinholes.) Rub both sides of the brass gently with very fine emery cloth and clean with
soap and water.
To attach the pinhole to your camera, you will need lots of black electrical tape or
black masking tape; hence, Mrs. Young's Law: Science as we know it would not exist if it
weren't for masking tape.
If you use about a 100-mm focal length and a 0.5-mm pinhole, the F-number will be about
200. The F-number of a lens is the ratio of its focal length to its diameter and is a
measure of the lens's light-gathering ability. If this ratio is equal to 16, for example,
we write F/16, which is pronounced 'eff sixteen." Typical lenses have variable
apertures that are calibrated with discrete F-numbers (called F-stops) of 4, 5.6, 8, This
is an ascending sequence with the common ratio of . As the F-numbers in the sequence increase,
the lens's light-gathering ability, which is proportional to the area of the aperture,
decreases by factors of 2. Exposure times, or shutter speeds, are similarly calibrated in
factors of 2; typical exposure times, in seconds, are 1/250, 1/125, l/60, 1/30,.... Every
time you increase the F-number by a factor of , you must increase the exposure time by a
factor of 2. A typical exposure in outdoor photography is F/11 and 1/100 s.
Photographers use a rule of thumb that you can handhold a camera provided that the
exposure time is shorter than or equal to the reciprocal of the lens's focal length; for
our 100-mm pinhole camera, this means about 1/100 s. Conventional lenses, however, have
resolving powers about equal to 50 lines/mm; the corresponding figure for the pinhole
camera is a few lines per millimeter. You can therefore tolerate perhaps 20 times more
blur due to the shaking of your hand, so let us say that you can hand-hold your pinhole
camera to about 1/5 s.
Another rule of thumb states that the exposure in bright sunlight is about F/16, with
an exposure time equal to the reciprocal of the film ISO speed. (The ISO speed is a
measure of the film's sensitivity; the higher the ISO speed, the higher the sensitivity.)
For example, if the ISO speed is 400, the correct exposure is about F/16 and 1/400 s. This
is about equivalent to F/200 and 1/5 s. Therefore, with a fast film, you can take pictures
in sunlight with your pinhole camera if you have a steady hand. Otherwise, you will need a
tripod.
Theory of the Pinhole Camera
The imaging device of the pinhole camera is a hole punched through an opaque material.
The image of a distant point is simply the shadow of the hole - or rather the shadow of
the material around the hole. That is, the image is a bright spot on a dark background.
When the hole is large, the image of the distant point is large and displays a diameter
equal to that of the pinhole [Fig. l(a)]. 7
An extended object is a collection of points; its image is therefore a collection of
spots. The smaller the spots, the finer the detail that can be discerned in the object.
Therefore, in many ways, the best pinhole is the one that produces the smallest image of a
point.
If we make the pinhole very small in an effort to improve resolution, we will arrive at
the situation depicted in Fig. l(b). Here, the hole is so small that the pattern of light
in the film plane is an Airy disk: the Fraunhofer, or farfield, diffraction pattern of the
pinhole. 8 In this region, the smaller the hole, the
larger the spot. Evidently, the pinhole that gives the smallest spot lies in the region
between the geometrical optics region depicted in Fig. l(a) and the region of farfield
diffraction depicted in Fig. l(b).

Fig. 1. Pinhole camera imaging a distant point.
(a) Large pinhole, geometrical optics.
(b) Small pinhole, farfield diffraction.
Figure 2, a graph of image radius as a function of pinhole radius, expresses this
consideration. When the pinhole is very small, the image radius r is the radius
of the Airy disk, or 0.61 f/s, where s is the
radius of the pinhole and is the wavelength of the light. (If we express the radius of the
Airy disk in terms of the diameter D of the pinhole, we get the more common
expression 1.22 f/D.) This equality is represented by the
hyperbola in Fig. 2. On the other hand, when the pinhole is large, the image radius r
is equal to the pinhole radius s, as represented by the line in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Image radius as a function of pinhole radius.
The curve intersects the line where 0.6l f/s = s, or,
roughly, where

Neither the hyperbola nor the line accurately represents reality in this region, yet
this is the region we are most interested in because the pinhole camera gives the sharpest
images there. This is the region between nearfield and farfield diffraction; here, the
image is not amenable to description by simple arguments.
Two-Point Resolution
Usually, we are more interested in distinguishing between neighboring points or lines
than in isolated points. Hence, we change our focus from image radius to resolution limit
- the smallest discernible separation between two image points. In the farfield case [Fig.
3(a)], when the image of a single point is an Airy disk, the resolution limit is the
radius 0.6l f/s of the Airy disk. In the geometrical optics case [Fig.
3(b)], we use a good deal of hindsight and assume that the resolution limit is 1.5 times
the radius s of the image - that is, of the pinhole itself.

Fig. 3. Limit of resolution. (a) Farfield diffraction,
Rayleigh criterion. (b) Geometrical optics, uniform disks.
In physics you can make your reputation by judicious use of the first two terms in a
Taylor series or by your ability to define normalized expressions. There seems to be no
opportunity to use a Taylor series here, so let us try normalization. We define normalized
resolution limit as resolution limit divided by pinhole radius and normalized focal length
as focal length divided by s2/ . This allows us to perform experiments with a number of pinholes or focal
lengths and to compare the results. In addition, it allows us to redraw Fig. 2 as two
intersecting lines (Fig. 4) instead of an intersecting line and a curve. Because of the
use of normalized variables, we can now plot data for any pinhole size or focal length on
a single graph.

Fig. 4. Figure 2 redrawn in terms of normalized focal length
Experiment
I performed a resolution experiment using as a light source a 650-W, quartz-iodine lamp
intended for home movies. To reduce stray light, the lamp had to be enclosed in a metal
housing and then cooled with forced air. In addition, since the beam could easily set
cardboard on fire at a distance of 50 or 60 cm, I passed the light through about 10 cm of
distilled water and a heat-absorbing filter. By the time the water began to boil, I
usually needed a break anyway; the heat-absorbing filter would have cracked with- out the
water as a prefilter. The lamp and the filters illuminated a resolution target that was in
contact with both a ground glass and a gelatin filter that provided more-or-less
monochromatic light at 500 mn.
The target was a three-bar target that had both horizontal and vertical bars. Figure 5
shows photographs taken with different conditions. The largest bars in the target have
spatial frequency of 1 line/mm.
The photographs in the left column were taken on the axis of the system; those in the
right column were taken 45º off axis. Similarly, the photographs in the top row were
taken with the focal length of the camera equal to s2/ ; those in the bottom row were taken with the focal length equal to about
four-tenths of that value.

Fig. 5. Resolution target photographed with a
pinhole camera. The largest bars have a spatial frequency of 1 line/mm. The upper
targets were photographed with the optimum pinhole diameter, the lower with a pinhole
several times larger. Note spurious resolution in (c) and (d) and astigmatism in (b)
and (d).
The sharpest photograph is Fig. 5(a). Figure 5(b) shows astigmatism: along the right
edge, the fifth and sixth horizontal bars are not resolved, whereas the corresponding
vertical bars are resolved. This is so because the pinhole appears oval when viewed off
axis. Both photographs taken with the shorter focal length also display spurious
resolution. Several of the sets of three bars are unresolved but appear as two bars, 1800
out of phase with the original three bars. As a result of astigmatism, the left-most bars
of Fig. 5(d) show both true resolution and spurious resolution at the same spatial
frequency. Figure 6 is easily worth a thousand words, since it explains spurious
resolution with no need for elaboration.

Fig. 6. The cause of spurious resolution. Three bars
(a) well resolved, (b) unresolved, and (c) displaying spurious resolution.
Figure 7 is a plot of normalized resolution limit as a function of the focal length of
the camera expressed in units of s2/ . The solid lines are the predicted values, as in Fig. 4. The data were
actually taken with three different pinholes under different conditions. 6
Agreement with the simple theory is quite good over most of the range. The resolution
limit is smallest when the focal length of the camera is about equal to s2/ , and there is a (weak) focus at this distance from the pinhole. (The scale
change where f = s2/ somewhat exaggerates
the sharpness of the focus.) We could call s2/ the natural focal length of the pinhole, and, indeed, the pinhole behaves
much like a lens with this focal length. For example, if you wanted to take a picture of a
nearby object, you would apply the lens equation with f = s2/ . If the object and image distances were not those given by the lens equation,
the pinhole camera would be out of focus and resolution would suffer. If anything, the
pinhole should be a little bit large, to increase its light-gathering ability. If,
however, the pinhole is about 20 percent larger than optimum, the light-gathering power
will increase by only 40 percent, whereas resolution will worsen by roughly a factor of 2.

Fig. 7. Experimental data: Resolution limit in units
of the pinhole radius as a function of focal length in units of the natural local length s2/ of the pinhole. Resolution limit is least when f = s2/ and the pinhole occupies a single Fresnel zone. The hatched
region indicates spurious resolution, which occurs only when the normalized focal length
is less than about 0.4.
Figure 7 also has a hatched area that indicates spurious resolution. Spurious
resolution is found only when the pinhole camera is defocused so that the image distance
is too short for the pinhole or, equivalently, so that the pinhole is too large for the
image distance. We also find spurious resolution with defocused lenses and, sometimes, in
the images of lenses that have aberrations.
Nearfield and Farfield
Figure 7 can be regarded as a sketch of the way in which light propagates through an
aperture. It is redrawn and annotated as Fig. 8. Close to the aperture, the illuminated
area is just the geometrical shadow of the aperture itself. Farther from the aperture,
diffraction effects begin to become apparent. This is the region of nearfield diffraction,
sometimes called the Fresnel diffraction region. In this region, the diffraction pattern
is not predictable from simple arguments but consists of concentric bright and dark rings.
The intensity on the axis might be a maximum, a minimum or an intermediate value. As we
approach the distance s2/ , the number of rings
decreases, and, finally, the diffraction pattern becomes one main lobe surrounded by weak
rings. Only at the distance s2/ and beyond does the beam acquire the divergence 0.6l /s (or 1.22 /D)
usually associated with farfield, or Fraunhofer, diffraction. Mathematically, the pattern
does not approach the Airy disk until several times this distance.

Fig. 8. Figure 7 redrawn to show the envelope of the
beam that passes through an opening. Near the opening, we see the geometrical shadow;
farther away, we see Fresnel or nearfield diffraction patterns and, finally, Fraunhofer or
farfield patterns. The beam does not acquire the farfield beam divergence 0.61 /s until it has propagated a distance greater than s2/ beyond the opening.
The common remark that you can observe diffraction only when the aperture diameter
approaches the wavelength is therefore not true. You can observe nearfield diffraction no
matter how large the aperture is. Provided that the edge of the aperture is not rough, the
pattern very close to the aperture closely approximates an edge diffraction pattern.
Likewise, you can always observe a farfield pattern if you can get far enough away. For
example, if the diameter of the aperture is about 1 mm, or 2000 , the farfield region begins only 0.5 m from the aperture. Similarly,
you can find the farfield distance of an arbitrary or irregular aperture by squaring a
typical dimension and dividing by the wavelength.
Optimum Focal Length
The natural focal length of the pinhole is f = s2/ ; with visible light, whose wavelength is about 550 nm, this translates to a
pinhole diameter

when D and f are expressed in millimeters. Since the optimum pinhole
diameter increases as the square root of the focal length, you can improve the detail in
the image by scaling everything up. For example, if you quadruple both the focal length
and the size of the film, you will retain the same field of view while only doubling the
pinhole diameter. Resolution is thereby improved by a factor of 2, since the ratio of the
film size to the resolution limit has been doubled. In the jargon of modern optics, we
would say that there are more pixels (picture elements) in the larger format. In rough
numbers, a 35-mm format with 50-mm focal length is about 180 pixels wide, whereas a 100 x
127-mm (4 x 5-in) format with 150-mm focal length is about 340 pixels wide, or about the
same as a TV image. Since the picture is two-dimensional, the larger format carries about
four times the information. Nothing is free, however; the larger format also has a higher
F-number, or lower light-gathering ability, so the exposure time is longer.
Off-Axis Imagery
The ability to expose very wide-angle photographs is limited by loss of exposure in the
corners of the image. The problem is not unique to the pinhole camera but afflicts nearly
all optical systems. Suppose that a small area is imaged off the axis of the pinhole
camera by angle (Fig. 9). From the
image plane the pinhole appears as a bright spot of light. The off-axis image is farther
from the pinhole by 1/cos so,
according to the inverse-square law, the irradiance there is less by cos2 . In addition, the pinhole appears smaller
by cos because of the obliquity.
Finally, the light falls obliquely onto the film plane and therefore covers an area 1/cos larger than the equivalent area on the
axis.

Fig. 9. Cosine-fourth law. The exposure off the axis by an angle is reduced by the factor
cos4 .
These three effects combine to reduce the exposure at the off-axis point by a factor of
cos4 . This is the famous
and infamous cosine-fourth law. If, for example, we wish to cover a 60º field of view
(30º half-angle), then cos4 30º = 0.56, and we suffer a loss equivalent to
one F-stop of exposure between the center and the edge of the image. For a 90º field, cos4
45º = 1/4 or two F-stops. Most of the time, this is far too much loss of exposure to be
acceptable. You can get around the cosine-fourth law by using a cylindrical film
"plane" centered around the pinhole. Then, the cosine-fourth law reduces to a
simple cosine law. Since cos 45º = 0.71, you can cover a 90º field with a loss of
exposure of only one-half of an F-stop. That is one reason those purists like their
oatmeal boxes.
Franke's Widefield Camera
In 1979, Franke invented the widefield pinhole camera shown in Fig. 10. 9
If its index of refraction is about 1.5, the glass or plastic hemisphere reduces a
90º field of view to 42º. Even a moderate purist like me will agree that this is a
pinhole camera. The actual imaging device is the pin- hole, and the hemisphere is just a
field lens, or a lens that increases the field of view but does not itself project an
image.

Fig. 10. Franke's widefield pinhole camera. If the index of
refraction of the hemispherical field lens is about 1.5, the hemisphere is compressed to a
42º cone.
Franke found that there is slight distortion beyond about 70º because sin , and that the best
index of refraction would be 1.3. This is the index of refraction of water, and, in fact,
R.W. Wood once submerged a pinhole camera in water to achieve the same effect.
Fresnel Zone Plate
The Fresnel zone plate is a relative of the pinhole camera in that it does not use
mirrors or lenses for its imaging properties. Since the zone plate is covered in most
optics books, I will not dwell on it, except to note that the zone plate is a sort of
generalization or expansion of the pinhole camera in the plane of the aperture. The zone
plate consists of a series of concentric rings, alternately clear and opaque. It works by
blocking diffracted rays that would have caused destructive interference at the image
point. 10 If the radius of the central ring of the zone plate
is s, the focal length of the zone plate is s2/ . The pinhole
camera may therefore be regarded as a zone plate with only one clear zone. Like the zone
plate, it focuses by diffraction.
The zone plate, like the pinhole camera, exhibits no linear distortion. They are the
only instruments I know of, except for the plane mirror, that have this property. In
addition, the zone plate can be useful in the ultraviolet and x-ray regions of the
spectrum, for which other imaging devices are hard to find. Self-supporting gold zone
plates have been manufactured for these spectral regions.
Zone plates have resolution limits comparable to lenses with the same F-number, and
they may be overlapped to form multiple images spaced by less than the diameter of the
zone plates themselves. Unfortunately, the zone plate has low efficiency and suffers from
veiling glare because most of the light incident on the zone plate passes through it
undiffracted and falls onto the image plane.
Cascaded Apertures
In the late 1960s, researchers at Laval University in Quebec City generalized the
pinhole camera along the axis. They found that they could place several circular apertures
sequentially along the axis and obtain a focus. 11 The
positions and diameters of the apertures have to be chosen so that each aperture alone
would display a nearfield diffraction maximum at the desired image point. That is, each
aperture must contain an odd number of Fresnel zones as seen from the image point. If
there are N apertures, the intensity at that point will be increased by approximately N2.
Since energy has to be conserved, this is equivalent to sharpening the focus.
The experimental work was carried out in the microwave region and was an attempt to
develop low-loss waveguides for communications. The purpose of the apertures was to keep
the electric field away from the lossy walls of a conventional metallic waveguide. I have
not heard of cascaded apertures since the early seventies and assume that the idea was
rendered obsolete by the development of low-loss optical fiber waveguides.
Pinspeck Camera
In the early 1980s, Adam Cohen conceived the idea of the pinspeck camera.
12 (I suggested that he call his paper "The Joy of Specks," but
he did not take this advice.) At any rate, the imaging device is an opaque spot in the
center of a larger aperture. The spot has to be large enough to cast a shadow, and the
distance from the spot to the screen has to be well under s2/ . Figure 11 shows how the pinspeck camera works. Each bright object point
casts a shadow of the pinspeck onto the viewing screen. If there are m resolvable
object points, the intensity in each of the shadows is a fraction (m - 1)/m
of what it is everywhere else. The pinspeck camera casts a very low-contrast, negative
image with several times poorer resolution than a pinhole camera. Do not, incidentally,
confuse the pinspeck camera with the Fresnel (or Poisson or Arago) bright spot.
13 The latter is a diffraction effect, whereas the pinspeck camera is based
on geometrical optics. Diffraction will only reduce the contrast of the image.

Fig. 11. Pinspeck camera. The opaque disk in the center of the
glare stop casts a shadow of each bright point in the object This results in a weak,
negative image.
Cohen's work was written up in Scientific American, along with my work and Kenneth
Connors's work on the pinhole camera. 14 As a result of this
article, we learned that the pinspeck camera had been invented just a few years before,
when a group working with x-ray tubes serendipitously discovered the pinspeck principle
because of metal particles lodged inside their film packs. 15
They now use the pinspeck camera for imaging the anode of their x-ray tubes so that they
can focus the electron beam onto the anode. Because the pinspeck camera has better
light-gathering capacity than the pinhole camera, the group does not risk shortening the
lifetime of the x-ray tubes just to focus the electron beam. In a similar way, A.T. Young
discovered the principle of the pinspeck camera due to specks of dust in a conventional
camera and used the images to analyze the performance of the camera. 16
The contrast of the pinspeck camera is so low that photon noise affects the image
and limits the camera to very simple objects. 17
Pinhead Mirror
In 1986, Thomy Nilsson, a vision scientist at the University of Prince Edward Island,
accidentally discovered an image of the sun reflected off a glint in a stucco wall.
18 He correctly interpreted what he had seen and concluded that a
tiny mirror could be used as an image-forming device, behaving just like a tiny hole. He
called the mirror a pinhead mirror and asked whether it was an undiscovered imaging
device.
Even those who remember history are condemned to repeat it. Three letters in Lasers
and Optronics suggested that the pinhead mirror, like the pinspeck camera, had been
invented before. For example, Donald O'Shea reported using a pinhead mirror to demonstrate
a solar eclipse to a larger number of people than would have been possible with a pinhole
camera. Koheleth said, "Ayn kol chadash tachat ha-Shemesh" ("There is
nothing new under the sun"). Who am I to argue?
References
- D.J. Lovell, Optical Anecdotes, Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation
Engineers, Bellingham, WA, 1981.
- Ernst Mach, The Principals of Physical Optics (Dover, New York, n.d.).
- James P.C. Southall, Mirrors, Prisms, and Lenses (Dover, New York, 1964).
- Pinhole Journal. The Pinhole Resource, Star Route 15, Box 1655, San Lorenzo, NM
88057.
- Jim Shull, The Hole Thing, A Manual of Pinhole Fotografy (Morgan, Dobbs Ferry,
New York, 1974).
- M. Young, "Pinhole optics," Appl. Opt. 10, 2763-2767
(1971), and references therein.
- M. Young, "Pinhole imagery," Am. J. Phys. 40,
715-720 (1972).
- Matt Young, Optics and Lasers, Including Fibers and Optical Waveguides, 3rd ed.
(Springer, New York, 1986).
- John M. Franke, "Field-widened pinhole camera," Appl. Opt. 18,
2913-2914 (1979). See also Tung Hsu, "Reflective wide-angle pinhole camera," Appl.
Opt. 21, 2303-2304 (1982).
- M. Young, "Zone plates and their aberrations," J. Opt. Soc. Am. 62,
972-976 (1972).
- John W.Y. Lit, "Focussing properties of cascaded apertures," J. Opt. Soc.
Am. 63, 491-494 (1972).
- Adam Lloyd Cohen, "Anti-pinhole imaging," Optica Acta 29,
63-67 (1982).
- K.D. Möller, Optics (University Science Books, Mill Valley, CA, 1988), pp.
161-163.
- Jearl Walker, "The pleasure of the pinhole camera and its relative the pinspeck
camera," Sci. Am. 245 (11), 192-200 (1981).
- A. Zermeno, L.M. Marsh, Jr., and J.M. Hevesi, Imaging by Point Absorption of Radiation,
U.S. Patent 4 085 324, 1978.
- A.T. Young, "Television photometry: the mariner experience," Icarus 21,
262-282 (1974).
- M. Young, "Quantum noise limits the pinspeck camera to simple objects," J.
Opt. Soc. Am. 72, 402-403 (1982).
- T.H. Nilsson, "Pinhead mirror: a previously undiscovered imaging device?," Appl.
Opt. 25, 2863-2864 (1986).
- Letters, Lasers and Optronics, July, 1987, p. 12.
Matt Young is a physicist with the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, Electromagnetic Technology Division, 325 Broadway,
Boulder, CO 80303, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He earned a Ph.D.
from the University of Rochester, Institute of Optics, in 1967 and is especially
interested in optics, optical fiber measurements, and optical image processing. Dr. Young
is the author of Optics and Lasers, Including Fibers and Optical Waveguides, 3rd
Ed. (Springer, New York; 1986) and The Technical Writer's Handbook: Writing with
Style and Clarity (University Science Books, Mill Vally, CA, 1989). His portrait was
taken with a pinhole camera.
Visit his web site at www.mines.edu/~mmyoung
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