Last year for my birthday, my parents-in-law got me a Diana Mini! A little cute teal toy camera that takes 35mm film….
Image from Amazon.com
I haven’t shot with FILM for years and years … .my last regular 35mm camera broke in fall 2003 and since then I’ve shot digital.
I’ve gotten quite a few toy and vintage cameras, over the last few years, so I’m playing more and more with film.
I got this camera beginning of April 2011 and I JUST finished my first roll of film. Partly because I was shooting 2-images-per-frame which effectively doubles the number of photos to take. And partly because I knew that the film would be expensive (relatively) to develop and replace, so I wanted the images to “count” …
Of course, now I realize that leaving the film so long could have effected the quality.
Oh well. Next time.
From reading this post from Elise, I decided to shoot the entire first roll as half-prints (2 images per negative frame).
Maybe the next roll I’ll do all as the square images …
I tried to be conscious about what diptychs I created …. but that didn’t always work out when I somehow, accidentally did things like this :
…. and somehow double exposed a photo (of me) in between the 2 “proper” photos (of Andrew).
There are so many things to get used to when playing with a toy camera … Honestly I feel spoiled by my manual dSLR. I know exactly what the settings are going to give me.
The Diana Mini has *some* settings (cloudy vs sunny), but really I just have to HOPE that the settings will work for that lighting.
For whatever reason, the darker images turned out a lot clearer than the bright images …
I also noticed that the images taken LATER in the roll turned out clearer.
Why would that be? It’s not like I really “got the hang of it” yet ….
It is nice that so many of the Scotland images turned out well-ish
(San Diego:)
You can view the entire set from this roll of film on Flickr here…. I’ve already loaded another roll of film into the Diana Mini and have started taking photos around the house ….
Interesting! I haven’t delved into toy cameras much, mostly because I can’t justify the $$ when I have a pretty DSLR sitting here that will do a lovely job. Maybe I just need to learn more toy-camera-esque photo editing techniques.
I don’t have any tips, but now I want one. I’m adding it to my Amazon wish list!
I realise this is a really old post but I would really appreciate some help.
I have just purchased a Diana Mini and I have it set to half frame mode.
I was wondering whether between each single shot you took you turned the advance wheel as far as it would go, or to get two shots on the same frame is there a specific amount you turned it? Or do you take two pictures and not advance it?
Thanks
Laura
I advance after every shot. If you don’t advance it you will get double exposures (one pic over the other in the same frame).