Camera Obscura by Alberto Morell

though a pinhole darkly

"The camera obscura is an optical instrument that was the forerunner of the modern photographic camera. It can range in size from a small tabletop device to a room-size chamber. The term is Latin for 'dark room', which describes the simplest form of the camera obscura, a darkened room into which light is admitted through a tiny opening in one of the walls or windows. An inverted image from the outside world appears against the wall or screen opposite the opening".

My idea for Landscape project is to make camera obscura and photograph upside down urban landscape.

Going through my research I focused on my favorite (and I guess the most famous) camera obscura photographer Alberto Morell.

Something really strange and also amazing happens when light enters a dark room through a tiny, tiny hole. 

Through this tiny hole placed in the middle of covered window coming light, which makes totally black room alive. 

Black walls looks like a movie screen, its surface covered with a fuzzy image of people and cars moving along. Thing is everything is upside down and you can feel a little dizzy. 

''A camera obscura receives images just like the human eye—through a small opening and upside down. Light from outside enters the hole at an angle, the rays reflected from tops of objects, like trees, coursing downward, and those from the lower plane, say flowers, traveling upward, the rays crossing inside the dark space and forming an inverted image. It seems like a miracle, or a hustler's trick, but it's high school physics. The brain automatically rights the eye's image; in a regular camera a mirror flips the image.'

Morell's breakthrough came in his own house in Quincy, a Boston suburb. He set his large-format view camera on a tripod in his son's bedroom, with only a pinprick of light entering, and opened the shutter. He left the room and waited. For eight hours. The result was mesmerizing. The developed picture showed inverted trees and houses from across the street hovering over the boy's toys like a scene from a fairy tale. "I was giddy," Morell said. "It felt like the moment photography was invented."

From that eureka moment, Morell has gone on to produce with his camera obscura one of the most original and enthralling bodies of work in contemporary photography. His views range from brazen New York City panoramas to warm Italian vistas. A few years ago he switched to color, enjoying its intensity, and began turning images right-side up with a prism.

I saw his photographs few years ago and I was so amazed. But that time I didn't know how he took them. 

Now I know how it's working and I'm going to do the same. Obviously it won't be in that big format, because I'm going to shoot it around Medway in my friends houses which are quite small.

I would like to get kind of this effect, but I didn't decided how I'm going to shot - in BW or color.