Pinhole Photography

Here are a number of images from a workshop I did with Holmfirth Junior and Infant School.
I gave a number of one hour workshops on pinhole photography, showing them examples and explaining how cameras work.

The pinhole cameras that they made were constructed from; coffee tins, pringle tubes/whisky bottle tubes, shoeboxes, biscuit tins and small plastic film containers. The image sizes varied from 4x4cm to 20x25cm. 

Due to limited time (one hour), in the classroom and the large number of students, it took three separate lessons to make the cameras and to ensure that there were no light leaks. Because there was no darkroom and a shortage of time, I had to take them all home in three binliners and load them with light sensitive paper paper in my spare time.

I produced the loaded cameras the following week and the children were led outside to, (in theory) be guided by me towards the best positions and viewpoints.

In actuality, what happened was that they scattered in all directions and I found that as I was the only one with a light meter and a second hand on my watch, I was confined to helping only one at a time. Towards the end of the lesson, having helped about half the class, I hunted around for the rest of the children and found that some had been patiently waiting for me, whilst others had just given it a go. Of those, a few had given the two minutes I had suggested, some had not listened and given less than a second, or done more than one exposure on the camera. One lad even hand-held his camera for nearly ten minutes! 
After the session I processed the images and brought the prints in for them to see. The children were wildly enthusiastic about making images with simple materials and from something that they themselves had constructed.