Have you ever been stopped by the police and bitten your tongue hard rather than say “Why don’t you go catch a real criminal”?  Well, our half term trip to a corner of these wonderful islands of ours was cancelled due to bad weather and I wrote a little post about it.  It was spotted, by someone higher up the tree.  That’ll teach me to go all clever and put links in.  I have no interest in compromising anyone with what I write, least of all my friends and colleagues, and so the dozen or so people who read my site in the few hours that post was up may notice it has gone.  Nuff said.  A hint of paranoia, you might think? Or just a bit of muscle flexing. I couldn’t possibly say.

So we’ve had a very quiet half term, with everyone getting over the communal cold we acquired in Somerset.  A trip to the cinema to see Goal 2 – I think if I want to see Charlotte’s Web I’ll have to go on my own.  A couple of squash games with older son on a winning streak. He’s due to play Dad in the 2 club tournaments;  we may have to call in an independent marker for those ones.  A bike ride on a glorious afternoon yesterday. 

The younger one and I spent an entertaining morning trying out pinhole photography, after I found one of those Christmas present kits that had been lurking in the cupboard for some considerable time.  We had made the camera that came with the kit and spent a while making a second from an IrnBru can, with the idea that 2 photos must surely be better than one.  The most difficult part of the whole process was blacking out the utility room; black bags just aren’t black these days.  A roll of tin foil, some duck tape and a blanket later, we achieved the impossible and loaded the cameras.  Next came the most embarrassing moment of the school holidays as we nipped outside, with a stool for a tripod, to take some pictures (well, two) of the Main Street, at high risk of being spotted by a school friend or three.  With that event successfully negotiated, and wondering what moving cars were going to look like on our long exposures, it was back to the darkroom for the moment of truth.  Or minute of truth… Or 10 minutes… Let’s try the other picture… I eventually decided the chemicals must be out of date.  What a let down!  Now that we’re organised, I need to track down some more chemicals for another go.

One problem I haven’t really resolved is working out where to place the camera to get the image we want without a viewfinder.  I didn’t quite feel up to the maths involved to calculate this properly and fudged a viewfinder with a curled up finger.  So for any maths or physics class who fancies doing this for me, the paper is 3×3″ (must be American), the distance from the hole to the paper in box camera is 3″ and in the IrnBru can is a bit less than 2 1/2″ (this one was going to be curvy).  And the subject is ??? high.  And then there’s the exposure…