Saturday, June 26, 2010

Diana Has Arrived

So as I talked about in one of my earlier posts, I discovered the world of Lomography and was hoping to one day buy the Diana f+ film camera. Well my dream has come true! I received my camera a few days ago…and well…it’s been interesting. This camera feels so fragile, and it is. It is almost 100% made from plastic. And loading film, can you believe I had to read how to load it???? I just couldn’t remember. And you don’t get to see how you focus. You basically judge about how far you are away from the subject you are imaging, set that distance to one of the 3 range options and point and click and hope for the best. My first roll of film was not the best turn out. I put on the 35mm back and set it to take normal rectangular pictures, but mistakenly put in a panoramic mask. So what that meant was when doing panoramic shots you only get 27 exposures and with normal you can get as many as 36 (which is the film I had) so that meant that my images overlapped each other. Nonetheless some images actually turned out to be pretty neat lookin’. For my next to rolls of film, I discovered my error from the first roll and so the overlapping was gone. My problem now is learning to be still while taking pinhole images (you need the shutter open longer to let enough light in with the very tiny opening). This caused a lot of blurry images…but again some looked really neat and others, well, not so much. But I’m learning. I started with the 35mm film figuring it would be cheaper to use. I’m anxious to get the 120mm film which is what the camera was really designed to work with. The best thing about the 120 film is that it produces vignettes which I absolutely love! When I get that film and start working with it I’ll let you know how it turns out…but for now I gotta get back out there and shoot some more…

Here's my favorite image from my first roll of film:



And here's another that I really liked from the first roll:



Here are more from my other rolls: