Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Of those four pinhole images, I think the first, the dandelion, has worked the best. What does anyone else think?
Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …
Being, as usual, some various things from this month about what I never wrote before.
Saturday 1
St David’s Day. And I’ve heard nothing about it at all this year. So have some Spring sunshine …
Sunday 2
In the alley, at the back of next-door-but-one’s garden, is a reasonably sized, bare, tree. Every evening when it’s sunny the local pair of magpies sit in the top of the tree getting the last of evening sun and getting warm for the night. And doubtless keeping a beady eye open for stray snacks. Who blames them.
Tuesday 4
This evening, 18:30, it’s pitch dark. And the robin is singing away somewhere in the garden. Mind it’s been a lovely sunny day; it almost feels like Spring, especially as I’ve had the window open.
Sunday 9
Very annoying. We have a pile of stuff to get rid of: like dead PC printers and a couple of boxes of miscellaneous metal/electronic recycling; 6 items in all. Just after lunch today we put it all together on the front path, I photographed it and booked the council to collect it on Wednesday – cost £48. Within 2 hours 4 of the 6 items had been magicked away by some slithy toves, leaving just 2 boxes of crap. Just to run salt in the wound, not only will the council not let me cancel the request, nor provide a refund, but I can’t even email them to say “don’t bother”. So they’re now going to have a rather wasted trip; and we’ve wasted £48.
In better news, it was a lovely sunny day, so I decided to feed the pond fish. At first we’re not interested. Then one realises there’s something floating to investigate. Oh, Fred, did you say something about food? Another joins, and another … until most were having at least a snack.
Friday 14
It’s been a deadly week, absolutely swamped with work, mostly for the literary society. In the words of Marvin, the Paranoid Android: “Life. Don’t talk to me about life.”
Saturday 15
Last evening, in bed, something unusual happened. Boy Cat came along. Instead of settling down on top of N, as usual, he snuggled, sausage-like, between us, head at chest level. He then spent 5-10 minutes purring and kneading my armpit. I think in almost 8 years it’s the first time he’s done this; kneading is normally reserved for N.
Sunday 16
A few surprises walking round the garden today. I knew the small bush flowering cherry was in bloom. But I’d not spotted that we had a couple of blue hyacinths out, nor that the flowering currants (Ribes) were just coming into bloom. Lots of leaves breaking on the roses, but none of the trees are yet showing any signs of life.
Monday 17
The gardener came. So did the central heating guy – to look at a radiator which needed bleeding and I couldn’t shift the valve. It needed a completely new valve fitting; which in turn needed a load of stuff moving. Job done. Whereupon the gardener and the heating man had a long talk; they’re old friends and haven’t seen each other for several years. You try getting an Irishman and an Albanian to stop talking!
Friday 21
So Heathrow Airport is out of power and closed – because of a fire at an electricity substation. (I’ve been past that substation hundreds of times, and it is huge! It’s also an open target from the nearby road bridge.) Why do they not have twin-tailed power supplies? They should have at least two connections, on opposite sides of the airport. Both should be supplying power 24/7; and each should be able to automatically pick up the slack if the other fails. That’s normal resilient business operation for critical systems. Not having it is either negligence or a political decision not to spend the money. Whichever it is, someone needs their dangly bits feeling. Having contingency backup that takes time to kick in is not acceptable. I wonder if they’ll be made to pay all the airports who took diverted flights – and, of course, passenger compensation?
Saturday 22
It’s just relentless at present; a continual stream of work on every front; so there’s much that isn’t getting done. Still we had a really good social call for the literary society at lunchtime; only 9 of us but that included one from each of US, Japan, Ireland and France; with an hour or so of interesting discussion. We started with one person in Putney and I (so 8 miles apart as the crow flies) sharing that it wasn’t raining; we ended with the news that it had just started raining in Putney, but not here. Minutes later we started a good thunderstorm!
Sunday 23
The forsythia is in flower. This seems early; I always associate it with May not March.
Wednesday 26
What a wonderful warm sunny Spring day – it really does make one feel much better! Several of the local trees are beginning to burst their buds: ash, silver birch, hawthorn, horse chestnut. The cherry bush in the front garden is an absolute mass of flower; I don’t think I’ve ever seen it with so much blossom. Oh and something obviously had a woodpigeon last night: three significant piles of feathers on the lawn, so it was well plucked. Two of the three below; the third was quite widely scattered.
Friday 28
For the first time since before Covid I had a check-up at the Brompton Hospital for my sleep apnoea. I didn’t need it, but they’re trying to make sure they’ve seen everyone who got postponed. Overall result: Excellent. Modern machines record all the data, so they can download it (I can also get most of it) and the data is good; mostly over 90%. The young lady (Registrar I guess) was fairly delighted. So they’ve put me on the Patient Initiated Follow-up pathway: this means they’ll not call me in for another 5 years, but in the meantime if I feel I need a check-up (or technical support) then I have only to ask. This is a new NHS process which saves a lot of pointless appointments, patient inconvenience, and consultant time; so they can clear the backlogs and get to see those in urgent need much sooner. It has to be win-win all round.
Saturday 29
It’s being one of those days! Even before I’d got down to doing anything this morning, three things had SNAFUed on me. Then the Waitrose delivery was over an hour early! Why do these things happen?
And did anyone notice that we had a partial solar eclipse this morning? I knew it was going to happen, but it was so low-key that it had gone before I noticed! I always seem to miss these things.
Sunday 30
What a glorious, warm Spring day. The pond fish are hungry. The catkins on the silver birch are just starting to break. And the garden is awash with gorgeous sun-yellow celandines – I knew we had some, but didn’t realise quite how much they’d spread themselves around; there are little clumps everywhere, as well as a couple of large patches.
Monday 31
So here we are at the end of March, and in terms of months a quarter of the way through the year already. Although we need another day or two to get to 25% in terms of the number of days. Still, at least, it’s beginning to look and feel like Spring.
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.
Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …
Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …
Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …
Well now here’s a turn up for the books. I’m in this week’s New Scientist. Each week in the Back Pages, they print a couple of questions sent in by (named) readers, and answers (or at least ideas of answers) from other readers to earlier questions. And this week they’ve printed a question I sent in a while ago.
The question is printed as:
Some worms regenerate when cut in half laterally, but what would happen if they were cut in half longitudinally?
Keith Marshall, London, UK
Hmmm … I’m not sure this is quite what I meant because “worms” is going to get interpreted as “earthworms” by too many people, especially as the online version has an image of earthworms. Maybe the question is appropriate for “earthworms” and not just the “flatworms” I had intended – I don’t know.
But space is limited, so the question as printed is a cut down version of the question I submitted:
There’s a recent report in Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/regenerating-deep-sea-worms-harness-live-in-algae-as-they-split-into-three/, of acoel flatworms regenerating when cut in half laterally. The head grows a new tail, but the tail grows two heads and then divides. But what would happen if the worm was cut longitudinally, with each half containing some head and some tail? Would this be viable, or is the presence of (say) a brain a binary requirement?
Nonetheless I shall be very interested to see what the readers come up with over the next few weeks. I’ll try to remember to report back.