Camera Obscura

The Camera Obscura in San Francisco is a large-scale camera obscura and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is located near the Cliff House restaurant perched on the headlands on the cliffs just north of Ocean Beach on the western side of San Francisco, California. The Camera and restaurant are currently owned by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Cameras obscura, devices which project an image of the surroundings onto a surface using only existing exterior light sources, usually sunlight, have a long history in San Francisco. The first recorded reference to one in the city is from the 1860s in an attraction called Woodward's Gardens. A previous incarnation of the Cliff...