'Pinhole Camera Making'

Today was the big day for Super D's photography birthday party. A busy morning organising everything ready for the arrival of D's friends at 11:30am.

Once all the kids (and parents) had arrived they all dissapeared out in the back paddock to kick the footy around, while some of them were happy hunting out big sticks to make a hut around the base of a tree. 15 or 20 minutes of play time, then it was back to the house to pick up the photography brief paperwork and a brief explanation of what they were all required to try to find and photograph. They all did very well and most of them found all of the items. First thing this morning we decided to have subway cater for the lunch, which turned out to be a great idea and saved lots of preparation and cleaning up time for us.

Back to the house for lunch and some of our home brewed ginger beer which everyone seemed to enjoy, then it was time for all the kids to make their shoebox pinhole camera. Firstly they had to seal up the boxes so that there wouldn't be any light leaking inside, then paint the entire inside of the box matt black, more footy and play time out the back while the painted boxes dried, them back to cut a hole in the front of the box, stick a small piece of aluminium on the inside of the box over the hole and push a needle through the aluminium which would act as the camera lens.

Then came the really fun bit, where we converted the bathroom into a dark room by throwing a thick blanket over the skylight on the roof and blocking the bottom of the door off with a rolled up towel. One by one, each child went into the darkroom with MsMun to stick the special piece of photographic paper on the back face of the matt black inside of the shoe box and then completely seal up the box with more black tape. We also put a small piece of tape over the pinhole lens at that point to stop any light from entering.

We decided that it was going to give us a greater chance of success by having the adults handle the camera work, so we set up a little chair in the front yard and each child handed their box to Simon who was in charge of setting up the shot to capture the kid sitting in the chair. My job was to pull the tape off the pinhole and expose the shot for between half and one second. I must admit that this seemed to be more fun for the adults than the kids by this point. After everyone had handed over their camera and had their picture taken, MsMun collected everyones cameras and they are now stored away ready to be processed. we still have absolutely no idea if this has worked in any way, but time will tell. Very exciting stuff.

The party ended up running about 2 hours over the predicted time also, not that anyone seemed to be in a great hurry to leave.

I think a great day all round, and the weather ended up being perfect too.