Pinhole Madness

Stick a piece a metal with a tiny hole in it inside a camera body cap and mount on a camera costing almost £3k when new, and this is what you get!

Pinhole cameras evolved from the camera obscura, with earliest known descriptions from Chinese writings circa 500BC. The first known description of pinhole photography is found in the 1856 book The Stereoscope by Scottish inventor David Brewster which included the idea as "a camera without lenses, and with only a pin-hole".

The Crystal Palace was a cast iron and plate glass structure, originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was relocated to Penge in SE London, reopening in May 1854, before finally being destroyed by fire in November 1936.

Would it be too much of a stretch of imagination to picture this shot taken inside the palace in the late1800s on a pinhole camera? Or perhaps one inside a large, similarly aged glasshouse at Kew Gardens?

Taken inside the far smaller Queen Elizabeth Temperate House, and shot for the Mono Monday Challenge of "camera" set by DonMac21.