Serendipitously, yesterday we discovered that today is the Pinhole Day. It also happens that this is one of the last days of our staying in Whangarei so we were thinking about how to celebrate both the events.

Our room is in front of a garden, so we thought about doing something simple: let's obscure the entire house (because the house is open, no door to the room) and...

Wait, one step back. Competition (which is not a competition, more a celebration) rules (it's a celebration with rules) says that the images must be made on photographic material and without a lens. I'm not a lawyer but I don't think what we wanted to do was really legit: we wanted to make an image without photographic material and to make a photo of it with a lens. That's material for class actions, let's not get sued.

So, we made a thing, but it wasn't submitted.

What we submitted was instead our morning coffee, because the jury will sure love the smell, and my favourite palm trees with unknown red berries sprouting out of them. These are mementos of a month of life too.

But yeah, the idea. The idea is simple: you take a room (camera) and make it dark (obscura). You also poke a hole somewhere because otherwise it's just a dark room and it's more boring. Someone says that you will be able to see the outside, inside, upside down.

This is obviously not true: I paid my camera a lot of money because they promised me there's a tiny Japanese good at drawing inside, so we needed to disprove this camera obscura nonsense.

In order to make our room dark, first thing in the morning I rushed out to buy black bin bag liners, to cover four skylights, three windows, and the large glass door in front of the room. Never been so excited to buy rubbish bags. On my way out there was our hosts' father/in-law, who wasn't too alarmed to hear our plan (he might have been more alarmed seeing us obscuring all the windows) and kindly lent us a few large black dust sheets, whose thickness probably saved our day, because the room glass door faces north so it's flooded with light (yeah, this place is all upside down).

Nothing else really remarkable happened: your average afternoon taping black bags to the ceiling and one pigeon slamming at full speed into the room window, for no apparently related reason.

Unfortunately, it appears that there's no manga artist hiding in my camera. On the other hand we loved to see the sky and the clouds projected on our bed and the garden filling up our walls.