Camera Obscura

A bundle of laughs, this is by far the most entertaining place, we have been to. When I first read up on this place I just couldn’t make out head or tails of what it was supposed to be. I guess you need to experience this place to believe.

In the 1850’s or earlier, the scots were getting to be a bored lot, there wasn’t much to do, no television, nothing, so they decided to pass time by spying. Yes Spying. They built a five storey-ed building on top of the hill where the Edinburgh castle is and then quite simply with the use of a mirror the size of a shaving mirror, three lenses aptly placed and a wooden board painted white, they started spying on the people in the street below the hill and beyond. The lens captured the view below, reflected it off the mirror and onto the wooden board painted white, this board was kept in a dark room, the lens and the mirror on the roof above and a submarine like viewer used to capture the images and show it back on the board.

It’s quite ingenuous and such a simple mechanism at that. Over the years the lenses have been replaced with more powerful ones but essentially the structure has remained untouched.

After doing a spot of spying we went down to the other floors and went through exhibitions which were typical Sigmund Freud and Out of the box thinking stuff. A few exhibits reminded me of stuff that you would see at the carnival, like the one with me having a Fat Head or the one where it looks like I have a Siamese twin and of course the one where our skin is shown in red and the rest of us in green. :)

There were paintings which created illusions if you looked at them from a particular angle they would be one thing and then from another angle they would turn out to be something completely different. There was a particular board where you could and stand next to and the camera would click your shadow in place, the twist was that the shadow wouldn’t be how you were standing earlier and it would be stationary, it wouldn’t move however much you did after the picture was taken.

In detail if i were to described, of the four floors below the spy floor, there was on each floor the magic gallery, the light fantastic, the Edinburgh vision, Fun, games and stairway and lastly the history of the attractions. Magic gallery is where you can swap your noses or your ears with those of a friend, you get yourself xrayed and all that. The Light fantastic has a whole collection of holograms and some of them were very creepy too. The Edinburgh vision was undergoing changes so we missed that one. The fun, games section had some of the stuff which we used to get in forwards, like spotting secret images, looking at a picture for a minute and then end up seeing dots everywhere and all that. The history of attractions gives you a recount of how it used to be in the days of yore :)

Oh yeah and the postcards I picked from there were also the illusion variety for e.g. I picked one up where the picture on the postcard was one of a man walking into a building or out of a building depending on how you look at the picture.

All in all it was a cute place and a brain teaser place worth a laugh.