i love this little plastic camera
i developed the first roll from my new-to-me diana clone, the reliance model, and i'll say, it is a magical camera. i love it. upon looking at them, the edge blurring is so extreme that it gives a slightly uneasy sense of movement, like being in a space ship and moving into light speed. in every photo you can see the ground and the sky start blurring off the edges, ultimately skewing the perspective hugely and adding to the ethereal feeling this camera already imparts to the photos.
i already can't wait to get more film, and shoot more and more with this camera. i have an idea that requires using close up lenses to take macro photos, and i tested it out with one shot on this roll, just to see how the close up lenses would work. it came out beautifully, and gave the photo an extremely shallow depth of field making it look straight out of a dream. i'm now getting more excited about this project that i want to do, and plan on taking more steps to making these photos.
i tried to test the camera out in every lighting condition i could think of. there was one shot, rendered as just a few abstractly placed dots of light, that i took inside a bar where we stopped in to pick up late night food. they had twinkling string lights strung up in the ceiling, and that's all that the multiple exposures randomly taken were able to capture. one morning, i woke up to the entire city outside my window enveloped in heavy fog. i went out and took two long exposures from my small porch, placing the camera on the railing. similarly, i took a portrait of my friend stephen on my couch, indoors at night, lit only by the small reading lamp in my living room. the camera was on a pile of books and i hoped for minimal shake. there's another of my friend dylan outside his gallery, at a show, that i knew would be filled with the motion blur of the moment, but it works and brings out his personality, a loud, ever-moving fun person, through the dimly lit alley we were standing in.
two of my favorites are photos of trees, one of a tree in byrd park, as i was sitting with bella enjoying the sun on a very nice, warm day, one of the first. the tree seems to go off in every direction, like arms reaching across the sky. the other is of a tree i passed on my way back from the library, in the midst of the city, a telephone pole with cables sticking straight out from the center of it. i still don't know if it was growing with the telephone pole, or if it was just directly in front.
i'll share them below.
