try again another day

This was a test for an entry for the work photo club monthly photo competition, the subject for which is Depth of Field. Not having got round to wandering along to the Meadows with a metre stick in order to hammer it half-way into the soil and photograph it I attempted to make a series of pinhole cameras with tracing (or, prior to popping out to a stationers to get some tracing paper, greaseproof) paper screens in the hope that I'd be able to get one sharp enough to be able to demonstrate the vast DoF exhibitable with pinhole micro-apertures. This was one using a screen about the size of the size of the size of the cross-section of a Coco Pops box, perhaps 100mm away from the pin-sized pinhole in the piece of aluminium foil over the end and shaded at the back with a towel. As expected, it demonstrated that using a much larger screen and either a smaller pinhole or longer focal length counteracted by the larger screen would be required to be able to get anything vaguely sharpish enough to be acceptable and for the image to not be too overwhelmed by the texture of the paper. Further attempts to use a bottom-of-shoebox-sized screen set a depth of a shoebox away from a very carefully-poked pin-tip sized pinhole indicated that a a more effective means of shading the rear chamber than a few towels would be required, so a bit of Sunday was spent attaching a few thick polythene Citylink-style bags and a large Jiffy envelope to the rear with tape, culminating in the attachment of the rubber lens hood which fits my 24mm to the end for a light-tight attachment. Unfortunately by this time it was well past the end of the day's daylight and no amount of lamps and torches could light the subject sufficiently to register anything, even after almost the maximal exposure my camera can expose. Improvements will be made and the apparatus used at some point, if only to avoid having wasted the time and materials constructing it.

Go and see A Serious Man, though (as usual) try and pick a very quiet evening in which to do so. The Cameo was full of apparent first-timers this evening, intent on laughing very obviously, over-loudly and over-longly in order to demonstrate that they were getting the jokes.