Yesterday was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, apparently, and here is a first experiment in pinhole photography that I conducted a few months ago. I drilled a tiny hole in a bodycap for my Pentax ME Super so that the images were exposed onto the negative, and I made a complete guess as to exposure times.

More than half the film had nothing on it, but the odd image made it through. Sadly, I cannot remember how long I did the exposures for, but it was a pretty sunny couple of days. On one, we walked to Old Harry Rocks on the Purbeck coast, and then went for a walk along Bournemouth Beach the following day.

You can tell that the pinhole is not entirely clean, and that some kind of burr obscures part of every picture. Sadly I dropped my camera and broke it, so I don’t think I will be able to replicate any of this experiment unless I can find a cheap Pentax somewhere.

What I like is that Bournemouth’s beach is so sunny and sandy and glossy, and even the Dorset coast generally, for all its Jurassic ruggedness, is still a delightful and wholesome experience, and yet these photos render these landscapes into something darker and more sinister, scenes of a murder viewed through a dead man’s retina; images of a lunatic nightmare drawn from the mind by an eccentric brain-viewing machine; the last haunting images discovered from a doomed expedition.