26 Instax Packs - #11

26 Instax Packs - #11 - Pinhole photography with Diana F+ with Lomography Instant Back using Fuji Instax Monochrome film. I was in the mood to shoot some instant film and decided to set up a couple of shots around the house with things from my collection - a skull model that I just finished building, a troll from my mother's troll collection, and a dragon that Alan made from clay when he was growing up.

I made a few adjustments to my method of making pinhole photos with the Diana F+ from the last attempt that I made on Pinhole Photography Day. The previous photos had turned out very blurry due to the camera shaking when the shutter button would release after a long bulb exposure. This time I used the shutter stop to keep it open in the bulb position after placing a piece of electrical tape over the pinhole. This way I could make the exposure without activating the shutter button, and causing camera shake.

The results from this method worked much better. After shooting a few photos out in the grass with my skull and troll (I don't know what my neighbors think I'm doing) I went inside to experiment with taking pinhole flash photos. This was very interesting as I had not thought of doing this until I heard about it on a photography podcast. I like the effect that I got with the skull and dragon with the troll in the background with glowing eyes, caused by the flash. I should mention, this photo was taken with the Diana lens on the camera using the Pinhole setting, which turned out a little sharper than the Diana without the lens using the pinhole.

I was pleased with the results from this pinhole photography experiment and would like to try flash photography with my Ondu MKII 6x6 and Holga WPC. 

26 Instax Packs - #10

26 Instax Packs - #10 - Skyblue Instax Mini Frame in Diana F+ with Lomography Instant Back. Wanting to shoot a pack film, but not knowing what to take photos of, I spent and hour or so at Codorus State Park on a pleasant Saturday afternoon with my Diana camera. I still need to work on getting the right expsosure and composition with this camera, but I do like the photos they look pretty sharp when they're right.

Pinhole Photography

Week 22 - Revisiting pinhole photography and film developing at home. Last weekend I picked up my Holga Wide Pinhole Camera, which still had a half used roll of film in it and drove out to Devil's Den in Gettysburg to finish the roll. I wanted to try a new photo composition tip that I heard about on a podcast to get better pinhole photos. 

I tried positioning my camera so that there would be close objects and objects further in the distance to create a more exaggerated pinhole effect in the photos. I couldn't remember what kind of film I had put in the camera, I had forgotten to write it on the back on a piece of tape. When I got home I developed it in caffenol (a mixture of instant coffee, super washing soda, and vitamin C powder) and saw that there were photos on the negatives when I pulled them out of the tank. I determined that it was Ilford FP4 from the brick of expired film that I had bought off of ebay last year. Some of the photos came out well considering the age of the film, but there were areas on some of the negatives where the backing paper numbers had burned into the image.

This past weekend I got out my Ondu MKII 6x6 Pinhole camera that I recieved as a Kickstarter reward last year which still had a half a roll of extremely expired Kodak Verichrome Pan film left inside from a couple of months ago. I drove out to Codorus State Park looking for a subject and wound up at the rental marina. I set about trying to make photos that had the type of pinhole composition I was trying to achieve, without worrying too much about the subject matter. I finished up and headed home to develop the roll in Kodak D-76 to find that the resulting photos were closer to the type of pinhole photos that I wanted to create.

In the next couple of weeks I want to try creating pinhole photos in my studio with some of the things in my collections, with and without flash. I plan to revisit pinhole photography on my Diana F+ camera with the instax back from Lomography to see if I can get the same kind of effect I got with the Ondu MKII. A pinhole photography exploration might be my next photography project after finishing 26 instax packs.

Meanwhile, I will be getting back into my studio and continuing my Create-A-Thon year long creative exploration soon, it's just been too nice outside to be cooped up in my studio!

Fuji Instax Square SQ10 Camera

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Week 21 - Fuji Instax Square SQ10 Camera - I have been eagerly awaiting the new Fuji Instax square format camera and film since it was announced last fall and I was able to order one on release day, May 19th. My package arrived the following Monday and I set about charging it up and briefly looking at the instructions. I had already read about the specs in numerous reviews, and on the Fuji Instax Square website and watched all the YouTube video reviews I could find.

I've used two packs of Instax Square film with it so far and I really love the results. I like how I can use the LCD screen on the back of the camera to frame up my shot to get just what I want in the photo and also to make sure the horizontals and verticals are all lined up. Even after making the photo, I can edit it by zooming in, panning left/right, up/down to get the composition just right before printing. I like the editing features where I can add a little vignetting (darker or lighter) a look I really like in my photos. The filters are nice, the ones I like best are the monochrome and sepia ones. Brightness can be adjusted as well. After editing, you can choose to print the photo. I really like that I can go out and concentrate on shooting photos, come back and look through them and choose and edit which photos I want to print. I can make additional prints, make further edits or go back to the original photo setting if I choose. The camera can also be used for traditional instant photo shooting where the photo comes out right after you take the picture.

Another thing that I'd been playing around with is that photos taken on other cameras can be printed from the SQ10. The files have to be saved with four letters and four numbers in the jpeg format into the root folder of the micro sd card that goes into the camera. Files from my iphone worked just fine, but I found that photos I had shot and scanned from film negatives required a little workaround to be read by the camera. I opened the files in Pixlr and saved them as jpegs with the exif data removed, and that seemed to work. I think it's neat that I can print photo scans from film negatives that were shot with some of the vintage cameras in my collection as well as my Holga. This may seem like a lot of trouble to go through, but then isn't film photography more fun when doing things the long way?

I haven't explored the bulb mode or the double exposure setting yet, but overall I am really pleased with the camera. I feel like now I will get many more keepers out of my instax photos than the sometimes hit or miss results of traditional instax and other cameras that use instax film.

26 Instax Packs - #9

26 Instax Packs - #9 - Fuji Instax Stained Glass frame in Lomo'Instant Automat. A couple of shots of Boulder Field at Hickory Run State Park and the others shot around our yard of flowers and my mom's troll collection. I really like the way the colors pop with the troll photos. It was early in the morning with a cloudy sky when I made those photos with the closeup lens on the Lomo'Instant Automat.

26 Instax Packs - #8

26 Instax Packs - #8 - Fuji Instax Mini Shiny Star Frame in Lomo'Instant Automat shot around Jim Thorpe, PA. This film looks way better in person, because the border is shiny, like foil, which doesn't show in the scans. This pack performed better than the last. I like the nice lomographic lighting effect of the Jim Thorpe Olympian statue.

26 Instax Packs - #7

26 Instax Packs - #7 - Fuji Instax Mini Airmail Frame shot around Jim Thorpe, PA with the Lomo'Instant Automat camera. The exposure was way off on most of these photos. I think that it was caused by my shooting into the evening sky causing the buildings to be in silhouette. The no flash, low light photo of the writing desk at the Jim Thorpe Inn looks nice as well as the view of Jim Thorpe from Flagstaff.

26 Instax Packs - #6

26 Instax Packs - #6 - Hanover, PA - Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. I used the pinhole on the Diana F+ camera from Lomography with the Instax back and Fuji Instax Monochrome film. It was difficult to keep the camera steady on the tripod when activating the shutter to open the pinhole. More experimentation will be necessary.

26 Instax Packs - #5

26 Instax Packs - #5 - Baltimore, MD - Fuji Instax Mini Stripe Frame in Lomo'Instant Automat just after dawn (except for Magnolia Blossom). Closeup lens used for flower bloom photos, all handheld, on auto setting without flash.

26 Instax Packs - #3

26 Instax Packs - #3 - Diana F+ with Instax Back using Fuji Instax Mini Monochrome at Gettysburg National Military Park in early evening. The exposure was a bit unpredictable and hard to get right, but there are interesting effects on the corners of some of the prints.