Category Archives: ramblings

personal, photography, ramblings

World Pinhole Photography Day

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Bah! Humbug! to the London Marathon. Much more interestingly today is World Pinhole Photography Day – always the last Sunday in April.

Before we had lenses for cameras, and indeed before we had photographic film, it was possible to view a scene, and project it onto a wall, using a tiny aperture. This was the camera obscura used by artists since ancient times.

Pinhole Dandelion
(Click all the images for a larger view.)

Once cameras and the photographic process were available, it became possible to do this trick with a tiny pinhole instead of a lens. Needless to say the results are not sharp, as they would be with a lens, and because of the tiny aperture exposure times are much longer than we’re used to these days. But the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image and the longer the exposure needed.

Nevertheless it is a fun, and often instructive, technique to try – and these days it’s very easy with (digital) SLR cameras. All one needs is a pinhole – and you can make that yourself! (If you hunt online there are people who will make a pinhole for your camera; or even sell you a bespoke pinhole camera.)

Pinhole Red Deadnettle

There are a number of “how to” sites on the internet. Basically you need only a spare camera body cap and bits and pieces you will already have lying around, like an empty drinks can.

A couple of years ago I made a pinhole for my Canon dSLR following the instructions on wikiHow. It was a bit tricky for me, with my ten left thumbs, but after three or four attempts at making the actual pinhole (in a piece of drinks can) I made something which works adequately if not brilliantly.

Pinhole Lilac Bush (from below)

Setting up and taking pictures is easy enough. Fit the pinhole (body cap) to the camera and mount the camera on a tripod.
Set the camera to manual and ISO 100 (or slower). You can’t adjust the aperture of the pinhole, which will be tiny, so you then have to experiment with exposure times of 10-30 seconds (compared with the normal 1/100th or faster) in good light; longer in poor light or night. Use a remote control (or the camera’s timer delay). Now experiment.

So today I found my pinhole, and had a wander round the garden to see what looked likely to make a decent photograph. The images here are the best results (slightly colour enhanced). For comparison the following final two images are of the garden with a pinhole and with a normal lens on the camera – I reckon for a piece of crude homemade old technology the pinhole doesn’t do a bad job.

Pinhole View of Our Hairy Garden
The same view of our garden with a proper camera lens!

Of those four pinhole images, I think the first, the dandelion, has worked the best. What does anyone else think?

personal, ramblings

Screwing Up the Time Zone

Apologies for the silence, excepting the usual regular posts. No excuses; I just plead life (ie. too much to do) getting in the way. But onward to today’s topic …

So today is one of the two days a year, when we bugger up our time zone – something I’ve written about before in 2008, 2009 and 2012 and probably elsewhere.

Yes, last night the UK switched to British Summer Time and put the clocks forward an hour.

Why? For no good reason that I can understand, and contrary to a lot of scientific research.

Basically what this change does is to mirror the effect of jet lag from flying east. And we know this is much more disruptive than flying west.

But it’s more than that. The disruptions to our circadian cycle can be profound, and possibly last for weeks. This should be worrying when nationally and globally we appear to be more sleep short, and with worse quality sleep, compared with pre-Covid (see, inter alia, here).

There’s a recent short article in The Conversation which summarises much of the evidence on the effects on our circadian cycle. The conclusion is:

These findings suggest the spring transition can have a ripple effect that lasts for weeks. It also suggests we are more finely tuned to the natural world than we might think.

Spring DST may seem like a simple one-hour shift, but for many, it’s much more than that.

We don’t need to keep changing the clocks. We’re not (yet) at war – which is where the clock change originated – and we have much of the technology to manage our working environments; extending, if necessary, to changing the hours we do work.

This whole charade is daft on just so many levels – see my earlier posts.

current affairs, ramblings

Leadership

James Timpson (Chief Executive of the Timpson Group, Chancellor of Keele University, Chair of Prison Reform Trust) has been appointed Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probation in Sir Kier Starmer’s administration.** It is excellent that the new PM is appointing people who have some knowledge of what their departments are supposed to be about.

Even better is the fact that Timpson (who, by the way gets a peerage to be able t be a minister) also knows something about leadership and management – a skill which recently appears to have been woefully lacking. A couple of years ago he posted his guiding principles online, and of course the internet has just resurrected them.

handwritten note
Click the image for a larger view

We need a lot more of the appointment of specialists and people who know how to manage. Now let’s have it applied throughout the NHS.

** I was going to say “government” but I was once ticked off by the late Lord Gowrie for this usage. The administration is the monarch’s government, not the Prime Minister’s.

photography, ramblings

Bits of Spring

It was actually sunny today, on and off, although quite windy. And Spring is definitely beginning to burst out all over. So I thought we’d have a few quick snapshots caught between gusts of breeze.

a single yellow celandine flower
The early celandines are still flowering; there’s a goods scattering
all across the garden (which shows how wet our garden is).
[Click the image for a larger view]
a single yellow dandelion
Of course there is also a good crop of golden dandelions
coming along for the early bees.
[Click the image for a larger view]
bright pink blossom all over our ballerina apple tree
Our columnar “ballerina” ornamental crab apple tree has been a mass
of bright pink flower for the last week.
[Click the image for a larger view]
delicate white & pink blossom on the Pinova apple tree
Meanwhile the Pinova eating apple has burst into bloom;
I’ve no great hopes of a good crop as there seem to be no pollinating
insects abroad and the compatible Falstaff tree is only just starting to flower.
[Click the image for a larger view]
how did this deconstructed bird feeder end up in the middle of the lawn?
Strangest of all, how did this deconstructed bird feeder get from
it’s hanger to the middle of the lawn?
The fox was seen on the trail camera playing with it one night,
but I can’t think a fox managed to get up and dislodge it.
[Click the image for a larger view]