top of page

Camera Lucida

Currently designing and building a camera lucida

Camera_Lucida_in_use_drawing_small_figurine.jpg

A while back my dad introduced me to a drawing aid called a camera lucida that was used extensively during the 1800's. It allowed an artist to trace an image in front of them onto a piece of paper below them by optically superimposing the image. After doing a bit more research and seeing the drawings done by Frederick Catherwood during his trip to Mesoamerica I became enthralled by the device. I also saw the work done by a company called neo lucida that was working to build modernized versions of the device which game me confidence that I would be able to make one as well.

Imagen5CatherwoodEstela-1.jpg
Catherwood 3_edited.jpg

Some of Catherwood's Drawings

While the initial idea for this project seemed simple and easy and required only a mirror and a sheet of glass, I had aspirations to make it more compact and of a more traditional design. I spent a while trying to find the original prism geometry and found they often used a simple right angle or Berville prism. After realizing that I needed one side to be mirrored I began to search for was to do so and went down a rabbit hole on physical vapor deposition and magnetron sputtering. This all led me to joining the linear accelerator project to get access to high voltage and vacuum equipment. We are currently working to revamp the high vacuum system and are working to design and build a magnetron for sputtering.

 

More recently after a hiatus from the project I have been talking with an optical engineer at Thor Labs, Nicholas Hordin, to help design the optical train. Most recently we discussed either using a coated beam splitter plate paired with a mirror set up 45° relative to one another, the mirror would be parallel to the optical axis, or a 50:50 beam splitter cube with one mirrored side. The only issue with these designs is the superimposed image would be flipped 180 degress.

bottom of page