Diana, the camera.

Diana, probably the second most 'famous' of the toy cameras after the Holga (and maybe the Lomo LC-A, but I don't really consider that a crappy camera...well, I do, but for different reasons). There is quite a bit of information about Diana and her clones on the web, but I've never really talked about it specifically. My Snappy, which is a Diana clone, is my favorite camera by far. I love my Fujipets and I loves me some Holga, but my Snappy is my buddy, my pal, my camera compadre. This is my current family:


Two 'true' Dianas, two Banners (one in pieces) and a Snappy. The Snappy was my first, shipped from Australia for 35 bucks. I think I had only used my Holga a couple times previously, so I was still new to the toycam thing. It isn't my favorite because it was the first...it just produces the best results. Every Diana behaves differently. They are CHEAP, so the various imperfections produce various results. Hell, if the Snappy wasn't so great, I'd stop using it, because it is a pain in the ass.


As you can see, the spool "feet" don't stay in, so I have to hold them in while I wind the film and stick the back on. I've done it enough that it's second nature, but when I'm in the desert and it's 115 F, I've come close to flipping out a few times. And actually flipped out a few times. This is the camera I've mentioned in earlier posts with the crack, so I had to take apart the front and tape it all up to lose the massive leak I was getting. A lot of work? Maybe, but it is fun to use, and I love the end product.



One of the chief complaints about toy cameras is that people rely on the effects to make the shot. While the effects certainly are a big part of the shot, I think EVERYTHING we do in photography is an effect to produce a pleasing shot. Toning? A trick. Macro? A trick. Hell, composing your shot is just a trick. Even not composing your shot is a trick. But a good photograph is a good photograph, and a bad photograph is a bad photograph. BUT!!! Sometimes my good photograph is your bad photograph, and blah blah blah! I see stuff that everyone loves, and oftentimes I yawn. I've taken plenty of bad shots with my toy cameras, at least what I think are bad shots (I usually scan maybe 4 out of 16 shots on a roll). And some people think my good shots are bad shots. This could go on forever. I just do what I like.
This is a shot I took with the Snappy that I don't like. It just screams ugly and uninteresting to me. I have tons of photos like this.


It doesn't matter how much blur there is, or how leaky it is, it's just kinda blech (though I bet someone likes it). But, I love this shot.


It's balanced, and the blur adds a kind of vintage, lonely feeling to it. Would it have been a decent shot without the Diana blur? Maybe, maybe not, but I work with the blur and use it. I don't rely on the blur to make the shot, but I control the blur to make the shot!
Anyway, I started ranting there. Time to eat. In the next few posts, I'll cover the Banner, which I've talked about before. A truly cheap camera. If they sold cameras for 50 cents next to the gumballs and Homies, it would be the Banner. And I'll also compare my two Dianas. One has a respectable blur, the other actually takes pretty straightforward shots, comparatively. Hasta whenever.

Gaah! Back at last...

Had a rough semester, didn't do anything except school, work, study...and break up with my girlfriend. SOOO...now I should theoretically have plenty of time to work on this blog. Haven't taken a lot of photos this year, but I did pick up a few cameras to talk about in future posts. One being a Polaroid 195, seen here next to my trusty Square Shooter.


The timer was broken, so I did a little timer mod using another, easier to use Polaroid timer.


A moderately difficult camera to use, mostly because it is completely manual, requiring a light meter (well, I do actually guess a lot, but film is too expensive to keep that up for long). I got an old Polaroid light meter and glued it to the bottom of my Lomo color flash that stopped working after one month. Crappy piece of plastic crap. Uhhh, anyway...so I could attach it to the flash shoe. Also, it weighs a couple or three pounds. The camera, not the meter.



The camera tends to overexpose when using the meter, so I've adjusted a bit when shooting. It has a super sharp lens, but requires manual focus with a slightly funky viewfinder focus deal. Takes some getting used to. Here is a shot using Type 665, ex-girlfriend legs.


One thing I REALLY like about it is the aperture, which goes down to 3.8, which for a Polaroid camera is HUGE. So that means I can take shots inside without a flash with less than a second for exposure, while an automatic Polaroid would often require up to 30 seconds of trying to hold steady. This allows for indoor creativity without a flash. Also, like other Polaroid cameras, you can take multiple exposures on one sheet.



And, of course, I like to scan the goop side...


I'll post some more from this camera soon! Also picked up a Kowa Kid, and the same camera with the name "Super-Lark Zen-99" (127 cameras). I'll talk about that soon. I've shot a couple rolls, but The Ekfe film I recently received was in horrible condition. I've had 50-year-old film in better shape. It was brittle, stuck to the paper backing, and was just bad film. I need to make a film cutter so I can use cheapo 120 film instead of paying $4 for garbage. Anyway, more on that soon!

On a side note, someone posted this comment:

"hi, i'm wondering if its the same (regards to expired film) with kodak advantix?
i usually use polaroid land cameras, lomos, holgas, sx-70's, etc so i'm not familiar with the more recent kinds of film... you look like you know a lot about film &things, and i just today found a pack of expired (2003) advantix film, do you think it would have any results, worth shooting?
thanks so much,
naomi"

Dear Naomi (I say, because I feel like Erma Bombeck), I'd say that film from 2003, unless it was ill-treated, left outside in the heat or in a car, soaked in water, whatever, would look no different than new film. Maybe a slight color shift or a little bit more grain, but it would probably look perfectly fine. Which is disappointing if perfectly fine isn't what you are looking for. But it also means that you can get really good deals on expired film that is probably as good as new, particularly if it was kept well, as most camera shops store film in a fridge. Thanks for asking!

Oh, also for future posts, I purchased a Nova c-41 developing kit to develop my own home color. Pretty nifty, Shifty. Here's a couple examples from my first roll, shot with my Snappy using Ektar 25. I have another roll to develop tomorrow. Just desert shots, but maybe something nice will come out of it.



Well, I have a pressing engagement with Final Fantasy XII. Oh the life of the newly single.

Better hentai than never...

Man, I haven't posted for awhile. Been busy with school and work and haven't done much of anything recently. Anyway...hentai. That freaky japanese cartoon porn. Though I don't get a 'charge' from it, I do find it completely fascinating. I look at some of it and just can't get over how strange it all is. How much white matter can a single girl be covered with? Who the hell really gets turned on by seeing intercourse from the INSIDE? How big can it get? How wide? How violent? It's all so far beyond even a Westerner's vision of S&M. Take everything and exaggerate it tenfold. I'd really like to talk to some hentai artist and find out what they see. Is it a contest to out-extreme the other artists? The detail is amazing in most of the art...every vein, fold, droplet. I won't even go into the lolita thing (seems it's usually either little girls or woman with freakishly large breasts). It really is borderline insane. So I like to take pictures of it! I don't want my shots to be hardcore...just suggestive. Polaroid Type 87 film seems to work quiet well, as it is a relatively harsh film, in terms of tone. Anyway, here are a few shots...

Konica WaiWai

Picked up a Konica WaiWai camera recently. This is a wide-angle (17 mm), fixed-focus disposable from Japan (there was a US version at some point). They are out of production, but you can pick them up on eBay. Nice thing about them...they are "disposable", but they can be reloaded with 35mm film with a little work! In my next post, I'll have some instructions on doing this. There are a couple of Chinese sites that show how it's done, but I figure some English would be nice, as it gets a little complicated towards the end.



As you can see, there is a mirror on the front so you can take self-portraits (as advertised on the package). The viewfinder also shows an approximation of what you are shooting, though with much greater parallax than the photos have. Still, it helps visualize the final image. What is pretty amazing is how wide the lens actually is. You can be about one foot in front of something and six feet to the left, and it still appears in the photo. The focal range is a bit odd, too. You can pretty much focus on something an inch away, but things in the distance are out of focus. So it really does require a some adjustment when shooting. I took it out for a practice shoot on my bike. The interesting shots are those with something directly along the edges of the camera. Quite a few of my shots didn't have anything close by, defeating the extreme wide-angle purpose. One negative, though maybe not, is the amount of lens flare. Doesn't bother me, but there was a LOT of it, as you can see in these photos. There is also a decent amount of vignette, which can be increased by using the flash.






All in all, a really fun camera! Now that I have a better idea of what it does and how to take advantage of its quirks, I want to take it out again right away! I have another roll of color film, but I need to pick up some black and white for "artsy" experimentation. I like the effect much more than the Lomo fisheye, and can see using it for art and just for fun. In my next post, I'll try step-by-step instructions on reloading it. It does take a regular 35mm canister, instead of one of those DC-whatever canisters that other disposables use...you just have to do some of it in the dark. Until then...

A few more olden moldies...

Some more playing around in the darkroom. These are from 1989 and are part of my final assignment in Photo 101 (or whatever it was called). I mostly put out crap for the semester and then suddenly 'blossomed' at the end, with all kinds of ideas. Guess it took me awhile to get used to the medium and move beyond the point, shoot and print attitude.
I initially shot a roll of film, focusing on textures and pattern. I copied the negatives using a zoom function on a copier onto transparent overheads, then used an overhead projector to..project (duh!) them onto my then girlfriend. I printed a few of these as stright shots, and some I used for experimenting in the darkroom.

This is a straight print:


And this was done with a small version of the print used as a paper negative:


Another thing I messed about with was using photocopies as negatives. This is the original photocopy:


And the print:


Another photocopy neg:


And a print made from a contact print of the print made from the paper photocopy neg (if that makes sense):


An example of the projected image on the model (funny, I never noticed the iron marks from mounting the photo!):


This is the same overhead used as a mask while printing:


Anyway, just a few more ideas from the past...

Why I need a darkroom...

Way back when, from 1988 to around 1992, I actually had a full darkroom. I currently just develop my own film and scan the negs onto my computer. That's fine for straight "prints", and photoshop does have some nice controls that are difficult to duplicate with an enlarger. On the other hand, there are tons of things I can do in the darkroom that are impossible to replicate on the computer. And if they are, it's not as much fun, anyway.
Since I haven't done anything new for the past month, I figured I'd hop in the wayback machine and post some experimental stuff from my darkroom days. I would spend hours in the basement playing around with developer, contact prints, zeroxed negatives, overheads, anything I could make a print from. I hadn't really thought about any of this for awhile until I was looking at Bea's site (see links on right side), and she was describing (I think) placing a paper negative into the enlarger, which was something I used to mess around with. So here are some things I did back then. None of this stuff is matted or was ever meant to be displayed. I haven't really cleaned any of these, either, so sorry for the dust and hair. It's just stuff I created from screwing around...most of it postcard size, since it was cheaper to work out ideas that way. I'll explain what I remember. There are some shots I have that have so may steps that I can't remember exactly how the finished product came about.

This is a fairly simple concept. Two separate negatives, with one half being blocked and exposed and the other side then exposed with the other neg...


This shot was a contact print from another contact print. So I printed the shot, used that shot as a contact to make a negative contact, then used the neg contact to make another positive. It's a nice way to soften the image and give it an interesting texture.


Further exploration of that theme produced some interesting effects. There are actually at least 30 shots in this series. I just kept using each contact print as another contact print, occassionally playing around with solarization or whatnot, until the image loses most of its definition through continious printing through thick paper. I'd like to try another more controlled experiment with this someday.



I can't remember the method here, where you take a neg and make a really high contrast neg out of it...maybe something to to with lithography? Anyway, I did a lot of that, too. Used to be big into combining nature and machine.


Not sure what I did here. Must have been some toning going on or multiple negs. I can't really tell, but I kind of like it. Looks very early 1990s, too. The streaks are actually part of the image and not damage or scratches.


Probably cut out paper contacts here, or possible cutout paper negatives, judging from the loss of definition. Like making a collage negative. Toned a couple of times, it looks like...sepia and blue. Again with the mechanical theme.


A continuation of the above shot, contact printed who knows how many times and solarized.


I'll post more of this stuff later. One of the reasons I like toy cameras so much is that they do a lot of what I tried so hard to do in the darkroom automatically. Not everything, but a lot of the low-fi effects are 'pre-installed' in my shots now. I'd love to take them and see what I could do with an enlarger. Anything to remove the computer from the equation. I love analogue. Someday...more money and more time.
On a side note, I haven't seen these girls in forever.

On another side note, a couple goofy things I found inside my old photo file:


I would LOVE to be installed today. Makes me think of Doctor Who.


I also would take those realtor mags and deface every single portrait on a page (where they would have 30 realtors listed on a single page)...because they deserve it (and, I know, realtor is caps and with a registered trademark, and I don't care, the rebel that I am...and it's sad that I know how realtor should be printed). Maybe I'll locate them someday. I save everything.

Dusty Memories

Haven't done anything cool the past few weeks...just school or work, work or school. I have a couple new cameras I want to try out. One being the Konica WaiWai wide angle (reloadable) disposable camera. Also expecting a Lomo LC-A+ in the next few weeks. Put off getting a Lomo forever, but this camera looks like fun. Been wanting to get some kind of nifty little quick 35mm camera (I never use my bulky Pentax), so maybe this will fit the bill. So, since I haven't been doing anything, and I'm tired of work and school, I'm dreaming of leaving, so here are some shots I took in Palm Springs last July. They were taken with my Snappy Diana clone. We were driving back from Los Angeles and I had to stop, since I don't drive through the area more than once every couple of years. It's actually a neat area. You can drive pretty much wherever you want in the desert. There are fences around the windmills, but in some spots you can get as close as 25 feet away. They are huge! The shots I took are very muddy and quiet...I assume a combination of the camera (the Snappy is by far my favorite of my Dianas), the film (arista.edu 200, don't really care for it), Diafine (lots of development artifacts, with the banding and all), the smog/dust and the sun being low on the horizon. Anyway...