Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Camera obscura   Listen
noun
Camera obscura  n.  (Opt.)
1.
An apparatus in which the images of external objects, formed by a convex lens or a concave mirror, are thrown on a paper or other white surface placed in the focus of the lens or mirror within a darkened chamber, or box, so that the outlines may be traced.
2.
(Photog.) An apparatus in which the image of an external object or objects is, by means of lenses, thrown upon a sensitized plate or surface placed at the back of an extensible darkened box or chamber variously modified; commonly called simply the camera.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Camera obscura" Quotes from Famous Books



... obtained your lenses will tell you their magnifying power.—You do not need smoked glass when looking at the moon.—A simple form of the camera obscura (dark chamber) is a box furnished with a lens whose focal length is equal to the length and height of the box. At the opposite end of the box from the lens a mirror is placed at an angle of forty-five degrees, from which the image received through ...
— Harper's Young People, July 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... with my consent, observe. That's where the wonder comes in!... I remember even now what a chaos my brain was in; everything was simply turning round—things looked as they do in a camera obscura—white seemed black and black white; falsehood was truth, and a whim was duty.... Ah! even now I feel shame at the recollection of it! Rudin—he never flagged—not a bit of it! He soared through all sorts of misunderstandings and perplexities, like a swallow over ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... Thus the business-man in the street has other to think of than poetry; but when he is inclined to look at a picture, or in his more poetical humour, will he neglect the pictorial counterpart of what he neglected before? To test this, show him a camera obscura, where there is a more literal transcript of present-day nature than any painting can be:—what is the result? He expresses no anxiety to quit it, but a great curiosity to investigate; he feels it is very beautiful, indeed more beautiful than nature: and this ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... hardly so, much less a tie of the Regency. So it is with the scenes of common life a century or two ago. They are being lost, because they were familiar. Here are two of them, however, which have limned themselves with the distinctness of the camera obscura on the page ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... Obscura.—I send you an early notice of the camera obscura, which is to be found in vol. vi. of the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres for September, 1686, p. 1016. It is taken from a letter of Mons. Laurenti, medecin, of Boulogne, "Sur l'erection des especes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various

... the back wall of our eyes. The eye is a darkened chamber, and the whole of the front part of it acts as a lens to bring the rays of light coming from objects we wish to see to a focus on its back wall, thus forming a picture there as distinct as the picture formed in the camera obscura of the photographer. This has not only been proved by the laws of optics, but has been actually demonstrated in the eyes of rabbits and other animals. Experimenters have held an object before the eye of a rabbit for a few moments, and have then killed the animal and removed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... is a very unpoetical, if not unphilosophical, mode of viewing antiquities. Your philosophy is too literal for our imperfect vision. We cannot look directly into the nature of things; we can only catch glimpses of the mighty shadow in the camera obscura of transcendental intelligence. These six and eighteen are only words to which we give conventional meanings. We can reason, but we cannot feel, by help of them. The tree and the eagle, contemplated in the ideality of space and time, become ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... receive them; and so he traceth them with his pen in their natural appearance; turning his little Tent round by degrees, till he hath designed the whole Aspect of the Field." [Reliqui Wottonianae, (london 1672), p. 300.]—In fact he hath a CAMERA OBSCURA, and is exhibiting the same for the delectation of Imperial gentlemen lounging that way. Mr. John invents such toys, writes almanacs, practises medicine, for good reasons; his encouragement from the Holy Roman ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... when the experimenters for the first time succeeded in projecting such rapidly passing pictures on a wall? If we think of the moving pictures as a source of entertainment and esthetic enjoyment, we may see the germ in that camera obscura which allowed one glass slide to pass before another and thus showed the railway train on one slide moving over the bridge on the other glass plate. They were popular half a century ago. On the other hand if the essential feature of the moving ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... invites the Goddess of Botany. 1. She descends, is received by Spring, and the Elements, 59. Addresses the Nymphs of Fire. Star-light Night seen in the Camera Obscura, 81. I. Love created the Universe. Chaos explodes. All the Stars revolve. God. 97. II. Shooting Stars. Lightning. Rainbow. Colours of the Morning and Evening Skies. Exterior Atmosphere of inflammable Air. Twilight. Fire-balls. Aurora Borealis. Planets. Comets. Fixed Stars. Sun's Orb, 115. III. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin



Words linked to "Camera obscura" :   chamber



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com