00:00 So I just saw you putting up some of your fabulous photography and it's not just done with any camera is it?
00:06 No, this is done with possibly the biggest permanent pinhole camera in the world.
00:11 And it's in Pontefract in the Valley Gardens there, it's a whole old summer house, Victorian summer house, that's been turned into a camera.
00:19 And with just a pinhole in it, a little hole in the wall, we've been taking these portraits.
00:26 We've been using co-actives, their actors from co-actives have come along and they've modelled for us
00:32 and they've had to stand still for at least 10 to 15 minutes just to get the pictures.
00:37 And what got you into pinhole photography?
00:40 Well, what really got me into it is, and we're going back into the dim distant past,
00:46 when Princess Diana died, they had the minute silence for Princess Diana
00:53 and I wanted to capture that whole minute in one photograph.
00:58 So I had to use a pinhole camera that I could have the shutter open for one minute during that one minute silence.
01:05 So I have a negative at home that has the whole of that one minute on it.
01:10 And the only way to do it was using pinhole cameras and from then on I've been hooked.
01:14 I've been doing them all over the place, made a camera shop into a camera.
01:20 We built a big camera in Bradford and then we've also did, on the fifth story of a block of flats in Southend,
01:28 we turned one of the big drying rooms there into a big pinhole camera and took photographs from five stories up.
01:34 So how long have you been doing this for?
01:38 Well, when did Diana die? A good 25 years now. A good 25 years, yeah.
01:43 And how popular is pinhole photography?
01:46 It's getting more and more. It's getting more and more popular, generally.
01:49 Do you think that's because people are fed up of just Instagram photos?
01:53 Yeah. You take it, you've got to take your time and when it's done, there's not much you can do to it.
02:02 You can't manipulate it too much in any way. You've just got this lovely raw image.
02:07 And the artist who's been doing most of the work is Rose Knight.
02:13 She's been doing it, I'm just mentoring her in this.
02:16 We've been working together for the last five or six years and so she's been doing pinholes.
02:21 And you can make anything into a pinhole camera.
02:23 Really good projects on Huntersfield Station using a suitcase as a pinhole camera.
02:30 So we were able to trail it around.
02:33 People wouldn't realise that there was a camera there and approach them in a ten minute exposure and take their portraits.
02:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]
