striation situation

one more thing: so, i couldn't help noticing the striations marking both batches of diana+ pinhole negatives. the bookcase image to the left is one of the more extreme examples, but i noted that even the images from the first roll (see below) all had single lines running down or across the images.

i'll admit that my care and handling of negatives leaves a lot to be desired but my mishandling rarely results in patterns comprised of more or less straight lines. it looks as though something scratched both rolls of film while they were in the camera. ironically, this was the first time i've used the diana+ when advancing the film didn't feel like a be-all, end-all struggle for advancement. otherwise put, most times when i've used the diana+ there have been stretches during advancement when i've been sure that the film will break. if anything, i'd expect striations when the advancement is tight.

so i'm not sure what's up with this as i've never seen these kinds of marks before. i was using arista edu ultra film (both 100 and 400 speeds) and i've used this film before--though perhaps not in the diana+. i checked the inside of the camera as well, but nothing looked suspect (or potentially scratchifying) there. so maybe it's the camera/film combo? i thought about putting some electrical tape on the edges against which the film passes (i was advised to do this with the holga when running 35mm through it). then again, i might try another round of diana+ pinholes tomorrow using a different kind of film--maybe color?--and see if the situation repeats itself. another diana+ mystery.

the big chill

well, diana+ and i are (once again, what's new?) not speaking. if we were, i'm guessing the livingroom conversation today would have gone something like this:


me: sigh
diana+: [mocking me] sigh
me: what?
diana+: what?
me: wtf? quit mocking me--you're always mocking me. what's your problem?
diana+: i don't have a problem. the truth is, you've always been ambivalent about me. you don't think i pick up on that? the holga comparisons, the way you are always thinking, "why can't your plastic be thicker, sturdier? why does the loading and forwarding of film have to be such a grand production?"
me: so that's why sometimes you work and sometimes you don't?
diana+: 'xactly.
me: sigh
diana+: [mocking me] sigh

and it's true. i was more than a little disappointed when the diana+ arrived. and i did judge its weight, feel and temperament based on my interactions with the holga. truth was, i felt a little duped. the diana+ was the second film camera i purchased this summer (the holga was obviously the first). i had the camera shipped to my mom's as i was going home to participate in a relay for life event and figured that i could test out the diana--if not during that event, at least while i was at my mom's. i remember when the box arrived--how i couldn't wait to show my mom this new camera. i remember opening the box in front of her, lifting the diana out of the box and feeling. . .well, duped. the diana was about 20 bucks more than the holga was and it felt, well, like a two dollar camera. i liked the look of the diana but wasn't at all prepared for how cheap, how plastic, how delicate it felt. certainly not worth the 60 bucks or whatever i paid for it. maybe diana sensed, even then, my ambivalence, my doubt that anything good could come of (or from) this relationship. actually, i immediately regretted having it shipped to my mom's as i wondered how i'd get this back home without it ending up crushed into a million little pieces.

i got the diana home in one piece (well, technically three since that's what she comes with) and since june i've had occasion to take diana with me on other trips. but i have to say, when i take her out, load her up, i'm always thinking, "okay this will be a total crapshoot." and i don't mean "crapshoot" in the way taking any image with the diana or holga might be a crapshoot with lightleaks or other kinds of quirkiness. i mean "crapshoot" because i may or may not remember to take the lens cap off, the film might not advance easily (or seemingly at all). and even if everything on my end seemed to have gone all right, well, i can usually look forward to blank frames, to grossly over- or under-exposed images, to the sound of the shutter maybe working, and, yes, the fear always remains that diana will end up smashing (or being smashed) into a million little pieces. and the truth is, it does really bother me--how non-substantial this (not particularly inexpensive) camera feels whether in hands or hanging from the shoulder. often times, i left feeling just as duped as i felt when opening the box in front of my mom.

i'd like to say that i keep going back to diana+ because i like a challenge. and this would, i suppose, be half-true. one of the reasons i keep going back is that i want to be right and i want diana+ to admit it has been wrong. and part of me thinks that if i can work more successfully with diana+, i won't continue to feel duped.

to be fair, when the images are good, they are very good. although the image of the panda below always makes me sad, makes me want to cry (but this is basically true of animals in/and zoos in general), it remains one of my favorites. most tellingly though, i'm always misremembering things about this photo. i always think, for instance, that it was taken with the holga. (yeah, diana, i know. paybacks are gonna be a bitch.)


















on my thanksgiving day pinhole woes: having recently claimed that there was nothing new i wanted to try on the photography front, it occurred to me that i wasn't trying hard enough to find new things to try. i turned to the alt group discussion threads and immediately learned about goop. half-truth: i saw this term there but had to search elsewhere to understand what it was. goop will have to wait since i've currently got non-goopable film in the polaroid and i've sworn that the next polaroid-related thing i'm going to try is an emulsion lift.

i've been fascinated with (and very much wanting to understand better and then to try) pinhole photography. i bought a couple of books pinhole photography but found this to be a very daunting prospect. i had taken a couple of pinhole shots with the diana months ago and thought that maybe i'd try my hand at this again and celebrate thanksgiving in a pinhole kinda fashion. since the matter of exposure times is one of the things i find most daunting about pinhole photography, i did a search on flickr and came upon this resource, put in an f-stop of 150 and printed out the exposure chart. diana+ and i (and my most sturdy tripod and dependable timer) were ready to go.

or three of us were, anyway. after setting up and taking/timing seven shots (the bulk of which were seven to fourteen minute exposures), i looked down and wondered if it was a huge problem that i'd neglected to flip the top switch from "N" to "B". i had the bottom switch set to "P" but couldn't remember if the top one needed to be on "B". i'm not, of course, blaming diana+ for this but it serves well as an example of why and how it is that we oftentimes do not get along well.

so fine. i develop this roll and since it's thanksgiving, i try not to focus on the seven blank frames that seem to be mocking me, and try to give thanks for the five frames shot after the lever had been switched to "B".

as i often find myself thinking/saying after working with diana+, "well, i guess i should be glad that there was at least one halfway decent shot out of the 12." (see phone image below)










. . .not wanting to admit defeat--particularly not on thanksgiving, i optimistically reasoned that the image of the paintbrushes below might serve as a catalyst for going back and reading up on the parallax error since i've finally experienced it.










. . .and here's one for the learning curve: this 49 minute exposure of 2 cats sleeping on a bed. no muy bueno. but i'm glad i tried it.











meanwhile: still committed to beating diana+ at her own game, i decide to reload but this time i use a roll of 400 speed film hoping that this might. . .well, speed things up.

and the good news--the great news, really--is all 12 frames had something scannable on them. not all of the images were good, but this hardly matters when it comes to my diana+ collaborations. what matters is that i saw something on the negatives for all 12 frames. there were, of course, a couple of accidental double-exposures. the not-so-funny thing is that these were almost back-to-back accidents. when i realized what i had done with the first botched shot, i moved the tripod upstairs, saying to myself, "okay, as soon as you get up there, don't forget to advance the film." but i did forget. and then i forgot again with the very next shot. could it be that there's something about my touching that most thin, fragile plastic body that automatically renders me, well, much denser, more thick-headed than usual?

but i really, really liked the mary jane shot (below) and the other two below that were okay-enough. mr. pinhole did say that the exposure times might need to be tweaked and where the mary jane shot is concerned, i really wish i would have gone longer than 13 mintues. all the shots, actually, could have used a little more light, a little more time. problem is, i'm not sure how much to increase things by--ten percent, twenty? i suppose once diana+ and i are again on speaking terms, we might work this out by restaging something like the mary jane shot and taking a series of exposures increasing the time by 5 percent, then 10 and so on. in the meantime, i've got some research to do. . .

bratz cam

shortly after i began experimenting with different kinds of film cameras, i found this bratz cam. the good news is that it was more or less a freebie. . .












well, it was free provided that you purchased the bratz doll and this ended up posing a small problem since i couldn't justify spending 20 bucks for the camera and throwing the doll out. i could have, of course, tried giving the doll to one of the neighborhood kids but i wasn't sure how parents would feel about this. with my luck, i'd give it to someone whose parents had forbidden them to play with bratz dolls. as luck would have it, my mom found, purchased, and sent to me last month a deeply-discounted doll and cameras set. (in the end, i ended up keeping the doll even though i noted that one of the neighborhood kids does, in fact, ride a bratz bike and guessed at least her parents might not object to her receiving a free bratz doll.)

so, let the experimentation begin! . . . on second thought, if i'm being truthful, my response was more timid, less committed, less hopeful. more like, "let the experimentation begin?" at the time i received the bratz cam i had just experienced a run of really bad camera luck. it felt like everything i touched or tried to do came out the opposite of okay. first, there was the dead-spider-in-the-praktica-viewfinder situation that i was never able to solve. miraculously, i did find a post from another person--i think it may have been on flickr--who described having the same problem with his praktica. at first, i thought it might be the person who sold the camera to me but his was a different model. unfortunately, no one responded to his post and to this day, i wonder how the spider got in there. i tried taking the top off the camera, no luck. i got the screws out but the top wasn't budging. (again, left wondering how the spider got in there.) of course, it didn't need to be a total loss. i could always try to frame shots around (or inspite of) the spider, but it kinda made me queasy to look through the viewfinder.

and then there was the polaroid 225 misfortune. the camera only cost me 2 bucks "as is" and i was hoping that cleaning up the piggy little camera and installing a new battery would do the trick. no luck. i read up on how its electromagnetic shutter system worked, tried different tests to see if the shutter was firing as it should. no dice. 225 was placed in the "no bueno" box, where it is currently hanging with mr. praktica-with-spider. (fortunately the polaroid 220 I had purchased for 3 bucks arrived a few days after the bratz cam did and it works wonderfully--didn't even need a bath.)

also joining the 225 and the praktica in the "no bueno" box were the parts and pieces of two of the dollar store trashcams i had recently purchased and proceeded to break (or to not be able to get back together--at least not in working order) while attempting to flip their lenses. needless to say, when the bratz cam arrived, i was feeling like i had something decidely opposite of the midas touch when it came to cameras. and it didn't help that i had wanted the bratz cam for so long and that it was a gift from my mom. if i were to mess this one up to. . .well, i'm thinking that would have pushed me over the edge.

on the first modification. the great new was that the bratz cam is fairly idiot-proof when it comes to getting it apart and gaining access to the lens. unlike the other two trashcams in the "no bueno" box, i could flip the lens on the bratz cam and get the camera together again without messing up the shutter mechanism. the four pictures below were taken after i had inserted one of the lenses from one of the broken trashcams. i flipped, (lightly glued) and placed the other lens in the bratz cam. the lens was very similar in both size and shape to the lens that came with the bratz but this one had a little bit more plastic around the outside of the lens, making it easier to glue and hold in place. i was bummed when i scanned in the negatives--hanging there to dry, the negatives looked pretty promising. otherwise put, it appeared as though something would actually be in focus. no bueno.

































































on the second modification. i am, if nothing else, persistently hopeful. plus, i knew that i had at least two more lenses left to experiment with. and if all else failed, i could just use the camera as it was intended to be used--with the original non-flipped lens. for the next modification, i decided to insert and again lightly glue in place the lens from a suprema sunshine trashcam. compared with the original bratz lens and the lens used in the first modification, this lens was much larger and much flatter. i'm pretty sure i flipped it before putting it in place, but the lens was flat enough that it was kind of hard to tell.

once again, no point of focus but after viewing the negatives, i hadn't expected as much. but in this case, the images really grew on me. but maybe it had more to do with my actually working up the courage enough to drive myself somewhere (in this case, ellicott city) so that i could take pictures of things that were not in my house, backyard or on campus. . .

. . .so as not to slight Diana+

. . .a camera with whom I’ve not always had the easiest or happiest experiences (that said, when she’s feeling cooperative she’s helped me produce some of the images I’m most proud of), I should say that I’m fairly pleased with the pinhole test roll. All the shots turned out--they weren’t all good, of course, but I didn’t have any totally botched shots (read: taken while lens cap was still on) which is huge in terms of my experience with the Diana +. Holgas are, in my opinion, the more consistent photo-makers.

Given my rocky relationship with this camera, it’s hard to say if the pinhole images look much different since it was often hard to see any of the pictures I’ve taken with the Diana. I also used a tripod with most of these shots which makes a huge difference, I think. As much as I love the blurry/dreamy look that Dianas often afford (note as well the light leak on the image above), part of me is really excited when I take a picture with the Diana that looks like it might have been taken with a non-plastic or non-toy camera. Ironic to respond this way when I bought the Holga and Diana precisely because they could provide images that didn’t look like they were taken with my canon or Nikon! I’ve been warned that you can’t really anticipate or control what these cameras do which is why (I think) I like the shots that don’t look like the majority of the others on the roll.