Pinhole Camera Model Documents

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Main Document

Pinhole Camera Model 

written by Wolfgang Christian

The Pinhole Camera Model demonstrates the operation of a pinhole camera. Light rays leaving the top and bottom on an object of height h pass through a pinhole and strike a flat screen.  These rays travel in straight lines accord with the principles of geometric optics.  Drag the object and observe the image on the camera screen. Simple geometry shows that the image is inverted and that the ratio of the image to object size (the magnification) is the same as the ratio of the image to object distance.

The Pinhole Camera Model was developed using the Easy Java Simulations (EJS) modeling tool.  It is distributed as a ready-to-run (compiled) Java archive.   Double clicking the jar file will run the program if Java is installed.  You can modify this simulation if you have EJS installed by right-clicking within the map and selecting "Open Ejs Model" from the pop-up menu item.

Last Modified June 11, 2014

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Supplemental Documents

Pinhole Camera Activity 

An activity that uses a pinhole to measure the size of the sun.

This file is available in multiple formats: .pdf, .docx

Released under a This material is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 by Anne Cox.

Last Modified June 6, 2012

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This file has previous versions.

Source Code Documents

Pinhole Camera Source Code 

The source code zip archive contains an EJS-XML representation of the Pinhole Camera Model.   Unzip this archive in your EJS workspace to compile and run this model using EJS.

Last Modified April 20, 2012