Tag Archives: Lomography

Diana F+ Black Jack {Two Rolls In}

Subtitled: “The Dog Ate My Homework”

If you’re just now joining us, my history with Lomography’s Diana cameras goes like this: I bought a Diana F+ a couple of years ago. I didn’t get along with it, so I sold it after a handful of rolls. I decided to buy a Diana+ the next year because I found one for a very small price. I thought I might want another F+ because I had light leak issues with my Diana+. I found a new-in-box F+ on ebay for about $60 less than it retailed and very happily bought it. I was excited to have the new camera, especially since it came with a flash (my two previous Dianas did not.) Excited, that is, until I got home from work the day the Diana F+ was delivered. My sister’s dog is a bit of a chewer. He got he box containing the new camera and went to town on it.

Bummer, right?

While the whole point of this new camera was the possibility that I wouldn’t have to tape the whole thing up to keep light out, I decided I would just tape up all the holes and give it a try anyway. Here’s how that went…

Roll #1 was expired Fuji Provia 400, cross-processed

Pinhole exposure

This is my newly-adopted cat, Sonja. My first time using the flash for this camera.  I don’t know what the bright orb in the photo is about. Freaky, huh?

This is actually an (intentional) double exposure. You can only faintly see the first exposure on this frame of film.

Another intentional double exposure

The remainder of the photos from this roll were taken in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where I’ve done some mini photo excursions lately.

Truck advertising for the auction of Graceland Too.

County courthouse on the town square at Holly Springs

Roll #2 was (fresh!) Kodak Tri-X

Photos taken in February during the ice and snow days, on and around the property where we live

 Conclusion?

Since I have written my conclusions about the Diana+/F+ in previous blog posts, there isn’t much to conclude here. Except that I will maybe admit that I think I am getting a little better at using the Diana, and I can even appreciate it for what it is (I know which camera to pick up if I want strong vignetting, now don’t I? 🙂 )

Conquering Diana

“Conquering Diana in a few several easy long and drawn-out steps”

(This project may only involve few rolls of film, but the rolls themselves were taken over the course of more than a year.)

I’ve been hung up on a camera named Diana for some time now.

Diana+ and Diana F+ are Lomography versions/recreations of a classic toy camera called a Diana that originated in the 1960s. I thought using a Diana F+ would be no step for a stepper, since I have used its sister from another mister, Holga, with great success (IMHO.) The two cameras couldn’t be that different, right?

Wrong.

I assumed the Diana had similar specs to my Holga. But I failed to notice some key differences before I set out to conquer Diana. I bought a Diana F+ from Urban Outfitters in the autumn of 2012, just before I went to England for a couple of weeks. I didn’t need the camera nor did I need to take a camera I’d never used before on an international photo expedition, but I did it anyway. The results from my first rolls were mixed at best.

Examples of photos executed with varied levels of success from England 2012. To be fair, I’d never used the camera before and didn’t really know what I was doing. And they don’t look half bad, compared to what was to come with the Diana+…

When I say that there are some “differences I failed to notice” between the Diana F+ and my Holga, I’m mainly speaking of the apertures available on each camera. On both of these cameras, the apertures are chosen by using icons on the lens. The Holga has “sunny” and “cloudy.” The Lomography Diana cameras have “cloudy,” “partly cloudy,” “sunny,” and a pinhole aperture.  On the Holga, the cloudy exposure setting is f/8 and sunny is (supposedly) f/11. I only ever use the cloudy setting though . On the F+, cloudy is f/11, and partly cloudy and dunny are f/16 and f/22 respectively (plus the pinhole that’s f/150.) In layman’s terms, the Diana F+ is more light hungry than the Holga. It needs more light to get a good exposure than the Holga does. If only I had realized this when I had the F+ in England! Since I had a Holga that I loved and understood, I ultimately sold my Diana F+. I just didn’t feel like I was any good at using it!

Bye bye, Novella Diana F+. I kinda of want you back now.

But several months later, I got a bee in my bonnet about getting another Diana so I could feel as if the camera hadn’t defeated me. I ran across an auction for a used Diana+ in my favourite special edition, the Edelweiss, for about $10. I bought it. It arrived and, gee, it was pretty.

I made a poor choice in film my test roll: some Lomography Lady Grey black and white film. As with all Lomography branded films, the Lady Grey is another manufacturer’s film but with Lomography’s name put on it. In this case, I had Lady Grey film that was made in China and is brand called Shanghai. Diana+ and Lady Grey film did not mix well. I even made notes of which settings I’d used for each frame of film, so I thought maybe I could learn from my mistakes. I couldn’t really learn from my mistakes this time, because the film itself was so terrible.

Roll #1 in progress – an attempted (unsuccessful) pinhole photo. The resulting photo is the fifth one below here:

(Accidental double exposure)

(Aforementioned pinhole exposure)

(Pinhole exposure)(Pinhole exposure)

Lady Grey looks like a “fat roll” (common problem in rolls shot with Dianas.) It was just husky to begin with. Fat rolls usually have light leaks because the film isn’t tightly wound around the film spool.

Not wanting to give up on the Diana+, I ran another roll through it. I used film from my stash of expired Fuji Provia 400 (slide film) and had it cross-processed. Results were an improvement over Roll 1, but not great. Roll 2 also revealed that light leaks were going to be a problem. Womp womp.

(Pinhole exposure)

Roll 3 was another roll of expired Provia 400 to be cross-processed. Maybe I should have tried some fresh film in the Diana+ for once…but every time I thought of putting a better grade of film in it, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I try prefer to use the good stuff in better cameras!

(And just look at those light leaks!)

(Pinhole exposure)

I did put tape on a couple of the seams for Roll 3 to try to keep out stray light, but I can admit that I didn’t do a thorough job of it. The camera is so pretty that I didn’t want to ugly it up with black electrical tape! After the third roll, I decided I had to try one more time but would tape the camera more thoroughly this go round.

For Roll 4, I used Provia 400 again. I figured, at that point, the film was the “control” factor in my Diana experiments. Trust me: I taped the camera up BIG TIME for my fourth roll.

This is actually a double exposure, but the first of the two exposure looks very faintGasp! This picture is one of my top favourite toy camera photos now! It’s everything I could ask for in a cross-processed, toy camera photo.

By golly, I was somewhat happy with my fourth Diana+ roll!

The Diana+/F+ is a toy camera through and through. It can give you mega vignetting, light leaks, a lens that renders images both blurry and sharp in places, and very limited exposure settings. But, heaven help me, I don’t hate all the vignetting or even all the light leaks. What is even happening to me?? I will say that I wish I’d kept my original Diana F+ because it didn’t have catastrophic light leaks, even though I never taped it up.

Conclusion?
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Giving Lomo a Go {Part One}

I mentioned in a recent blog that I had never used Lomography film up to this point in my photographic journey, and I listed a couple of reasons why that is the case. I mean, it’s nothing personal, Lomography. Your films are just usually cost-prohibitive for me!  But I have always liked the idea that retailers who stock  Lomography film (such as Urban Outfitters) are stocking film types that you wouldn’t normally be able to find outside of a proper photo shop or that you’d have to order online.  So, say I was in Memphis and decided I wanted to shoot some medium format film in my Holga. I couldn’t just walk into Walgreens and get that. And sometimes photo stores aren’t open at night or on the weekend. I could waltz into Urban Outfitters and pick up a pack of medium format film, even if I had to pay a premium price for it  and even if it’s not really “pro grade.” Lucky for me though, our local Urban Outfitters recently put a whole slew of Lomography film on clearance. I was able to grab a few packs of their 35mm Color Negative 100 film super cheap!

I have been missing a non-professional grade color 100 ASA film, since that film speed is one that has almost gone the way of the buffalo because  film companies are cutting back on the types of film they still produce. For those of you who might not be familiar with film speeds/ISO/ASA: The lower the number, the more light needed to get a properly-exposed photo. And vice versa. Higher film speed, less light needed. Say you are shooting in bright daylight: it is generally to your advantage to use a lower film speed. Shooting in dimmer light? Higher film speed (this also holds true for film “sensitivities” on digital cameras.) There are other issues involved with the ISO rating of film you use, such as film grain and color saturation.  You tend to get brighter colors and finer film grain with the lower film speeds. The higher the film speed, the larger the grain.

The colors you get with 100 ASA film are a big reason that I miss having a lot of choices in that particular film speed. I used to enjoy Fuji’s Super HQ 100 film or Kroger 100 (rebranded Italian film) in my toy cameras. I miss those films! That’s why I had high hopes for the Lomography CN 100 I’d gotten from Urban. Did it live up to those hopes? Let’s take a look!

One of the custom motorcycles on display at an auto auction where my family caters meals

Fallen petals

The day Mallory came to visit me down in the great state of Mississippi 

Adventures in Como, MS with Mallory and some horses. There may or may not have been
a minor electrocution – don’t worry though. It WASN’T one of the horses…

Wildflowers and weeds while we were sitting under a tree in front of the horse pasture

Showing Como’s Main Street to Mallory – she thinks it’s the closest
thing to  Mayberry that she’s ever seen. That means she loved it.

Ricoh FF-1 • Lomography Color Negative 100

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Conclusion?

Based on this roll, the jury’s still out as to whether or not I’ll come to love Lomography CN 100. Most of it was shot on a very bright afternoon in Como, Mississippi. I (and most photographers) tend to avoid shooting outdoors in the brightest mid-afternoon light. So these photos may not really represent how I’d normally work with a film like this. Since I have eight rolls of Lomography CN 100 left,  I’ll have lots of opportunity to put it through its paces! And, I’ll keep you posted about my findings!

{X-pro} Expo

A few months ago,  Urban Outfitters had a bunch of Lomography film on sale for half price. I’d never tried any of their films before, since it’s not really any cheaper than the more “serious” brands of film that I normally use. Or even any cheaper than the less serious ones I use. But when I saw all that film that UO had on clearance, I decided now was as good a time as any to give Lomography film* a try. I grabbed a few packs of their 100 ASA color negative film because it was too cheap to pass up. Also too cheap to pass up was some of their Xpro Chrome 100, which is slide film that they mean for you to “cross process” (or x-pro.) That means you take film that would normally be processed in chemicals specific to its type and process it in chemicals meant for a different type of film. Most of the time, cross-processing is referring to taking slide (positive) film that would normally be processed in E-6 chemicals,  and processing it in regular color (negative) film C-41 chemicals**.  Depending on the slide film, it can give you crazy color shifts or color casts, or high contrast and super saturation (click here to see a bunch of my cross-processed stuff from over the years to see what I mean.)

(Is that whole paragraph much technical information to follow?? I know a lot of you have seen an Xpro fiilter on Instagram!! Maybe it gives you a frame of reference??)

What could this Lomography Xpro Chrome 100 do for me though? I loaded a roll of it into my Ricoh FF-1, and I found out what it could do! I didn’t have anything specific in mind that I wanted to shoot with the Xpro 100; I just carried my FF-1 around and pulled it out when I saw something I liked.

A beauty shop in my town, that I love to photograph

Mustang

Discarded shop sign

“Please, no pictures”

Ghostly niece and dogs

Lunch on the Memphis Pizza Cafe patio

Inexplicable double exposure of my friend during a Midtown photo shoot

One of my favorite post offices 

Boat shop drive-by

Cracker Barrel rockers

Niece’s new neon kicks

Waffle House dinner after a photo shoot with my niece

Ricoh FF-1 • Lomography Xpro Chrome 100 • cross-processed 

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Conclusion?

I really loved the results – the photos were contrasty, but not over the top with color shifts. Just enough to look a little different than the norm. Now I’m kicking myself for not picking up more than one pack of it when I had the chance to get it for 50% off! Maybe I’ll find a good deal on some again soon!

*As far as I know, most Lomography film is film produced by other companies which Lomography has purchased and rebadged
**Sometimes it can be tricky to get slide film cross processed because certain labs think it will mess up their C-41 chemistry, but I think that any effect on the processing chemicals are negligible. Lomography helps out users of their xpro chrome films, by labeling the film canister “C-41.” I certainly had no problem getting the local drugstore mini-lab to process the photos in this post.

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