This pair of Converses took a beating. They were pink and silver before the holiday.

These photos were taken with the Zero 2000 pinhole, average exposure approx 2.5 minutes.

It amazes me how this lensless camera has almost limitless depth of field.

The bluring is a result of the flowers blowing in the wind.

This is Sevendroog Castle.  Designed by a Mr. Jupp, this folly was built in 1784 by Lady James in the grounds of what was then Park Farm Place.

She built the tower following the death of her husband, to commemorate his capture of the pirate fortress of Severndroog on the Malabar coast of India on the 2nd April 1755.

Once more the double exposure pixie strikes. Oh for exposure locks! It is just a question of workflow, but I use several cameras and it is taking a while to get used to the quirks of each one.

I wonder what Lady James would think of Severndroog now.

We were visiting the area I thought was Oxleas Woods which I know now is made up of Oxleas, Castle and Jack Woods. Sevendroog Castle is in the eponymously named wood.

These negatives were stand developed in Rodinal 1+100 for 1 hour. From my point of view, a very satisfying and lazy way to develop. 1 minute of gentle inversions (about 25) followed by 59 minutes of nothing at all.

For closer in I used the Rolleicord, the Rollei photos are all done in Rodinal 1+50, 15 minutes with the usual 30 second shuffle.

This is a grand folly (aren’t they all) and really brings home to me that at a time when large sections of the population of the UK were starving or living in semi-feudal conditions (particularly as a result of the taxes to raise money for the war with France) some families had the money to spend on structures like this. Even in 1784 it must have cost a fair bit of money. Paradoxically though, if Lady James had been more of a benefactor we wouldn’t have this wonderful architectural heritage. Tough call…

From a photographic point of view, the graffiti adds bucketloads to the scene, a contemporary counterpoint to the folly and the fact that whoever is supposed to take care of it can’t… There are iron grilles on the windows, tags all over it and from a ‘heritige’ perspective it fails badly.

There is more graffiti elsewhere in the woods too, including the trees.

Another nifty self portrait, more like ET though

Further along the wall.

It is difficult to see the tags on the tree below, but I like the light and shade

I’m amazed at the results!

I have to get my head round the long exposures though! As usual, the cemetery is bright sun (huh?) and deep shade. The first place I metered needed a 27 minute exposure. With those sort of times you need to be alone with a book, tis a bit much to ask the partner and/or dog to hang around that long. Now I know why people build pinhole cameras out of coke cans, you can leave them and come back after lunch.

With these conditions I was averaging 3 minutes per exposure and that was doing my head in. Even 3 minutes seems an insanely long time to be exposing film to light, and it seems even longer looking at the stopwatch on my phone!

I should trust it though. This was the first time using the Zero 2000 ‘in anger’ so I will get used to it in future.

A cemetery is a natural place for pinhole photography, if perhaps a little cliched. Most of these images need to be clicked on (to enlarge) to do them justice.

This double exposures (above and in the top photo) were intentional I’m happy to say.

Something that is probably obvious is the angle of view, ie low. This is because I can’t be arsed to carry a tripod so I only had a Manfrotto 210B/ME10 table-top tripod. It is a sturdy little beast with a ball head but it is only about 10cms high. Which is not high at all. Fine if there is a gravestone handy to rest it on, but otherwise it is on the ground. I hadn’t realised how wide the pinhole is, so I captured a lot of foreground in some of the shots. I’ll know better next time.

A couple of rolls of FP4 took over an hour to expose. I also had the Super Ikonta with me, so from the super-soft and dreamy we are jolted into the relatively sharp.

I took a shot of these NZ gravestones before with a reflected light meter and they were all blown out. This is a whole lot better. And very sad too.

The cemetery is full of angels, natch:

One of the big draws for me is the ramshackle nature of parts of the cemetery. Some corners look like my children’s bedrooms used to when they were younger, only on a monumental scale:

All souped in Rodinal for 16 minutes, FP4+ exposed at 100

Brookmill Park

Just around the corner from us where we walk Gizmo. I didn’t open the shutter on the pinhole completely but got a happy accident with the diagonals. Isn’t everything with a pinhole a happy accident?

I’m beginning to realise just how wide the ’25mm’ pinhole is on medium format film.

And there’s the rub as they say. I was out in mufti testing my new pinhole camera and what better place to test out this environmentally friendly little box made from managed/reclaimed teak wood? I also had the Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta with only three shots left on the roll so I wasn’t exactly prepared for photojournalism. Three shots, I wasn’t counting those left on the pinhole. So I had to make the best of them.

Climate Camper from Brighton

I think I did make the best of them, or at least one. I will go out on a limb and say that I think this is one of the best people photos I’ve ever taken (yeah, maybe the bar is low…). I like ambiguity and this has it in buckets. The expression on the woman’s face – the framed half-smile, her eyes slightly obscured by the fence, the fence itself, the tents, the walkie-talkie radio, they all make me want to ask questions. As I took the photo she said ‘…like those concentration camp photos?‘. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about Lee Miller’s 1944-45 war photos recently it must been subliminal because as soon as she said it, it was obvious.

This and the rest of the photos below come from the pinhole, all with 40-50 seconds exposure! You so don’t need a Nikon/Canon for photojournalism.

Now here is something tangential, the relevence of which will hopefully become clear. On Tuesday night West Ham and Millwall football supporters were fighting pitched-battles around Upton Park. For those unaware of English football tribalism there has never been very much love lost between these two clubs, it goes well beyond animosity (and the dumb-ass assertions by ill-informed journos that it is ‘South vs East London rivalry’. Millwall Football Club is in South-East London you fuckwits, South London is a different place. Just to confuse them more, Millwall the place is on the Isle of Dogs, East London).

The fixture had been scheduled for months so the Met police have had just a bit of notice to prepare for the inevitable.

Can we assume (a) they were not prepared for the obvious or (b) that they are quite happy for the two sets of supporters to beat the shit out of each other (thus saving them the trouble of wading in themselves to do the job) and subsequently pick them all off at leisure later from the CCTV (plus the covert filming and photography that they were up to as usual)? Or (c), The Tactical Support Group are a bunch of cowards and thugs who, when faced with a group of people that would and could fight back, hid away in their vans. If (a) they must be incompetent. If (b) it casts an interesting light on recent police actions at events such as the G20 where public safety was held up as one of the reasons for the para-military attacks on, among others, the climate campaigners. What about the public safety of the residents of Upton Park on Tuesday night? I think we can work that one out without spelling it out. Upton Park is not the City innit… Finally (c). Seems the most likely. There is of course an additional option (d) that suggests the ranks of the TSG are drawn from those two sets of football ‘supporters’, that they were there in civvies, keeping their hand in, and indulging in some vicious racism at the same time.

However, this is Blackheath where a lot of the people who work in The City live (they are among the few who can afford to live there), so in some perverse way somewhere it follows that the residents need to be protected, but in a new post G20 softly-softly cuddly way. However, it is still hard to avoid seeing the surveillance cameras on the 50 metre high gantry overlooking the camp which can presumably look up your arse as you are having a crap, or miss the ‘command centre’ around the corner. But most bizarre of all, the campers appear to have kettled themselves by bringing their own fences. I don’t think Wat Tyler did that…

But the bleeding obvious question is what exactly are they/we being protected against? Having been caught-up myself in a few ‘situations’ in the 1970s & 80s (including being kettled by police horses at a Man U/Liverpool match outside Old Trafford, before we had ever heard of the topical kettling, or wondering why the 159 bus failed to stop and pick me up during the 1981 Brixton riots which had gone off behind me) I know how frightening and intimidating large groups of fighting football supporters, rioters etc are. These are not the feelings I get at the climate camp which largely seems full of happy people. WTF is there to be frightened of?

The answer lies in the banner perhaps?

I will bet there are busloads of Tactical Support Group coppers waiting round the corner in case it ‘goes off’. Just waiting…

Rather than explain it all there is a very good page on photo.net about pinhole photography.

Pinhole photography is probably one of things you either ‘get’ or ‘don’t get’. I most certainly ‘get’ it, as have many people, going right back to Leonardo Da Vinci and beyond (Ibn al-Haytham in the 11th century in fact). The camera obscura is, in my humble opinion, one of the most magical and entrancing optical devices ever invented.

The first images are a bit rough around the edges. I’ll get the hang of it the more I use it and find out what suits it best photographically.

The first thing to get used to are the insanely long exposure times. The ‘lens’ is f/139 equivalent, so using the sunny f/16 rule (1/100 second at f/16 in sunlight with 100 ISO rated FP4+)  results in a 1 second exposure for the f/139 pinhole. However, I took it out in the evening, so it was nothing near approaching sunny f/16 and the exposure was supposed to be in the region of 8 seconds. At this point we need to know about reciprocity failure which is well complicated, although there are simpler explanations.

What I needed to know is that exposures over 4 seconds in FP4+ have to have the time multiplied by a factor to avoid reciprocity failure. 5 seconds becomes 13 seconds, 10 seconds becomes 31 seconds and so on up to a staggering 9 hours 20 minutes if the ‘normal’ exposure indicated on the meter is 1 hour.

Yesterday evening the meter was proposing 10-15 second exposures which translates as 31-55 seconds to compensate for reciprocity failure (and reciprocity is one hard word to type…)

As usual I trotted up to Point Hill avec chien to test the camera and also as usual I forgot to wind the film on once or twice. I almost always quite like these accidents:

The second thing to get used to is that there is no viewfinder so there is an element of guesswork and luck involved in what exactly will be seen on the finished photograph. Point and shoot in extremis. This became a little more critical later on (see following post). The long exposures obviously need a tripod but I was only carrying a little plastic Ultrapod tripod. The Ultrapod has the advantage of being able to be lashed to an upright support such as a fence which is OK if there is an upright, but eff-all use in an empty field, or Blackheath Common as becomes apparent shortly.

One thing you don’t have to be concerned about is focus. Because there is no lens there is an infinite depth of field (despite the nominal f/139) so everything is in focus. Don’t expect sharpness though, just relax and enjoy the dream

I feel like there is a lot of potential with this pinhole with careful choice of subject and good support. First choice of photos probably wouldn’t have been failing light in a howling gale in one of the windiest places in London. The absurd simplicity of the camera is very pleasing to me and I’m looking forward to running more rolls through it. In fact, a 5×4 pinhole is becoming very appealing too…