Gotbadger

I’m still enjoying taking photos and still wincing everytime I get the bill for processing a roll. The diana is great but in a lot of ways your limited to what you can do especialy when you get the fear.

The fear is a strange beast its caused by taking pictures in low light with a diana. Basically the diana is terrible in low light so much so you fear that your entire film will come back blank a few months back i got 3/12 back, I didn’t want to take another film in low light for weeks after that. So the answer to this I surmised was to get a 35mm camera the film is cheaper and you get more shots per roll best of all I would go for a camera with a lens that wasn’t photo-phobic.

Some quick hunting around for second hand places my friend had recently picked up a olympus XA from a  place in town described as “A small room full of cameras you have to get buzzed into”.  Classic Photographics is what you imagine an independent second hand camera shop should be, the guy persumably the owner was great help managing to give me a few cameras to choose from that met the criteria “35mm rangefinder that was interesting”. After a bit of haggling i was the proud owner of of a FED-4 and paid in cash. Of course they didn’t accept anything else…

Shooting

The FED-4 is a russian rangefinder loosly based on the leica cameras of the time. It looks amazing everything is mechanical bar the light meter that runs on science and it weighs about as much as a fully loaded 4 door  family saloon. Oh and it came with a lovley (matching) leather case at no extra charge!

For my first roll I decided to go for some ISO 400 fim because ISO 400 was what I was used to and mainly because I had ‘The Fear’ having no idea how the camera would perform. The best part was the light meter only going upto ISO 320 so i had to kinda gustimate the calibration.

But as luck would have it  I manged to shoot some passible shots in daylight and some blurry stuff at a gig not too terrible considering I was expecting 100% of the gig shots to come back blank.

Camera Manual Links

If you have a FED-4 you might find the following handy:

http://www.cameramanuals.org/russian_pdf/fed_4.pdf
http://www.marriottcameras.co.uk/instruct3/fed4/with_pictures.htm

I bought a diana+ some time ago from the Baltic in Newcastle not a remarkable event but its led to some of the most rewarding photography Ive done in quite some time.

It all started about a month ago Ive been happy for quite some time with my trusty Sony Ericsson taking some fairly nice pictures but being nocked about every day for months on end was starting to take its toll and I ended up with some dust inside the camera somewhere that I couldn’t remove easily. As some of you might know I usually like to take a few snaps at Leeds festival but with my camera out of action I began to look at some kind of alternative and having seen a few pictures my mate took on a disposable the previous year I thought that might be the route to go down.

Now the reason I thought the disposable might be a good was the feel of my friends photos they had a certain softness to them which was similar to the effects of my k600i in low light. The reason I like this softness is that reality is rarely perfect when you remember things you remember the composition and forget the imperfections of a scene. With a digital camera you get outstanding detail but unless your lucky or very talented the shot tends to be as good as the time you invest in it, this means you can end up with shots that don’t capture the mood or feel very static.

I happened to be talking to one of the guys at work about this and he asked if I had ever heard of lomography and what he went on to describe basically the things I was looking to see In photos I took. I made the decision the same day to go and get a diana+.

My first film was somewhat nerve-wracking, the diana+ shoots 120mm medium format films that are in themselves quite hard to get hold of let alone develop but as luck would have it one of the best pro shops outside of London spectrum imaging happens to be on my doorstep. Having not shot film in about 10 years it was something of a shock to go back to and because I really don’t know what im doing when it comes to the science of photography a lot of my first film was complete guesswork. I’d also decided to go with iso400 film as I had read the diana+ would under expose iso100 a lot of the time however having never shot anything on iso100 either I was both terified of overexposting or underexposing everything. In the end I decided to just guess and try and follow the rules

The first film was an experiment, I just went out into Newcastle and took photos of things and tried as many different ways to use the camera as I could think of. Removing the first roll of film from the back of the camera was strangely satisfying the images that it had captured and the results it might produce an interesting and mysterious prospect. By the following day I had resigned myself to failure I expected If I was lucky I might get 2 or 3 good photos with the rest of the images unusable. Thankfully I was mistaken.

After the first experiential roll I had no longer had as much fear of taking pictures and when the time for the festival came round I just shot whatever I felt like trusting in the camera. Leeds was a fun place to shoot lots going on lots of great moments to capture I even met a fellow lomographer at Leeds and we had a little chat and he suggested I invest in some slide film and get it cross processed for some really interesting shots. Now with the photos back I cant wait for an excuse to get out there and take some more