Sunday was World Pinhole Photography Day, where photographers are invited to take photographs using a pinhole camera.

These photographs were all taken over the weekend. Since they were taken on film, it took me a couple of days to develop the negatives, scan them in and prepare them for uploading.

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Lacock Village would have been picturesque if they hadn't ruined it by filling the high street with cars.

Lacock Abbey was interesting. This was the home of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the photographic negative, which allowed multiple prints to be made of a single image.

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We woke up this morning to find that it had snowed in the night. I took my cameras and walked into Coventry to see if I could find anything to photograph. Unfortunately the snow was melting quite quickly. It was only a thin covering to begin with - it wasn't enough to stick on the roads.

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More pinhole photographs from Coventry. These photos were all taken around summer/autumn last year but didn't get uploaded at the time. Colour photographs of the same scenes are shown for comparison.
 

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These pinhole photos were taken in the abandoned lead mines around Cwm Rheidol, in 2004.  

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• Findon.info, home of the Pinhole Photography web ring.
• Pinhole Gallery
• Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day celebrated on April 29th.
• Even Kodak have a page describing pinhole cameras.

It was a stroke of luck that we chose to go to Stratford during the Shakespeare birthday celebrations. We were only in town for a few hours and what we saw was slightly disappointing. There was country dancing and morris dancing in the road outside the Birthplace. There was also a parade through the town in the afternoon which consisted of a few bands and people wearing suits with a small number of people in period costume.

Our main reason for going was to visit the Shakespeare Houses, 5 properties in and around the town with various connections to the man. We started off at the Birthplace and finished at Mary Arden's House (which was possibly the most interesting, being the largest of the attractions with two houses and various farm buildings to visit).

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A photographer has followed the course of the River Sherbourne through the culvert under the city. A description of the journey and photographs are on his website.

Spon Street in Coventry contains a lot of the medieval building in the city, some of which were moved there in the 1970s. During daylight hours the street is usually full of parked cars. These photos were taken early on a sunday morning to try to avoid too many vehicles.

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Coventry Cathedral, build in the 1960s, stands next to the ruins of the 14th Century St Michael's Cathedral. The old cathedral was heavily damaged by German bombing in 1940 and now only the shell remains.

The photographs below compare B&W pinhole photos with colour photos taken from the same position.  

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Pinhole photograph of the Eleanor Cross near Northampton.

The same view, taken with a normal camera.

Red Squirrel, photographed at the Formby Nature Reserve. We didn't manage to get close to the squirrels because it was vey busy and there were a lot of coach parties of noisy kids which probably scared them away. This was the only clear photo I managed during the hour or so that we were there.

At lunchtime I had a walk round the shops. I went to Jessops in the Bullring to get some of the medium format black and white film I use in my pinhole lubitel. I was wanting some of their own brand film because it is cheaper and works well enough. I was told it was out of stock and had actually been discontinued. I checked their website and where they used to sell 3 different versions of the film, they only had one listed and that was out of stock. It looks like if I want to keep doing more pinhole photography I am going to have to bite the bullet and buy some more expensive branded film, which always seems a bit overkill when the camera is a bit cheap and rubbish!

Yesterday I developed the photos from my pinhole Lubitel camera. This was a photo of the space centre from sunday:

When I was scanning in photographs from my visit to London, there were a few which had come out rather dark - either due to the flash not being powerful enough or the photo being taken into the light so the subject was underexposed. When these were scanned in, there was very little shadow detail and the image was quite grainy:

In order to reduce the grain and increase the detail, I decided to use a technique borrowed from astronomical image processing, called Image Stacking. I used a program called Registax (I actually used Version 2, V3 is out now but I haven't used it yet).
I scanned the image in 10 times and loaded them into Registax, allowing it to align and stack the images. The resulting image (below) shows a noticeable improvement in detail.