(new year's res) Roll of Film #3

In a burst of fruition and serendipity, I happened to actually read one of the dozens of promotional emails that crowds my inbox every hour and learned that the Lomography store was giving away a free roll of film during a "Photo Week" (or something like that, I didn't read the email that well) in August. So I scooted my way down to the store and picked up a roll of their own brand of film, Lomo Color Negative. I shot on my La Sardina wide angle camera over the next few months - my journeys took me all over Manhattan and up to Portland, Maine for a most lovely bachelorette weekend, and I made sure to snap at least of couple of pics every few days. The results are stunning - the colors are vibrant and saturated, and while the few pictures I took at dusk did not come out at all, hazy, overcast days were no problem. For being a cheap and plastic camera, the La Sardina takes some fun and dreamy photos. It's not as "gimmicky" as some of the other Lomo cameras I have (the Diana camera is good but a little too retro and blurry for my taste and the FishEye is frankly annoying) and the pictures tend to be much richer than anything I can natively take on my iPhone. I'm taking this camera and a handful of film to Europe and I can't wait to see what images I get!

Film: Lomogropahy 400 Color Print Film - ISO 400
Camera: La Sardinia 35mm
Photo locations: Midtown Manhattan, Portland Head Light (Portland, ME), Central Park

(new year's res) Roll of Film #1

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to take at least four rolls of film this year. Since none of my little plastic analogue cameras handle low light very well, I assumed I'd have to wait until sometime in the spring to start taking these photos - but a few weeks ago we here in the northeast were surprised with a bright, sunny, mid-50's temps weekday afternoon (thanks, global warming?). I also serendipitously had the entire afternoon off with nothing to do except run some errands along 5th ave. and slowly make my way through the park and to the upper west side for an evening performance. Warm temps, bright skies, and a casual urban stroll? That, my friends, is a recipe for a photo walk if I ever saw one. So without hesitation I loaded up my Diana Mini and set out to see my city through a tiny, slightly fuzzy, toy camera lens.

Film: FujiColor - ISO 100

Camera: Diana Mini 35mm

Photo locations: Bryant Park, 5th Avenue (for NYPL, Rockefeller Center), Central Park, Lincoln Center

Playa del Carmen on film

Sometime in mid-April and fed up with the never-ending winter that encased all of New York City for months on end, J and I decided to (temporarily) rectify the problem. We cashed in a ton of points and spent the week at the über-luxurious Paradisius Playa del Carmen La Perla, where we pretty much did nothing but lay in a thatched-roof Bali bed for hour on end, punctuated only by a dip in the pool or a plate of nachos. 

One afternoon, however, we decided to get off our butts and head in to town. Since we were told it was a 30 minute walk and it was approximately 115 degrees out, we had the hotel call a taxi - a wise choice considering the heat and the possibly not-so-safe trek we would have had to make along sparse Mexican roads, but also a not-worth-it choice because the round-trip in a cab came to about $30 for what amounted to two 10-minute drives. But whatever, when in Rome, right?

The town was dusty and touristy. Vendors hawked every tchotchke imaginable, and though brightly colored "authentic" Mexican goods lined 5th Avenue (the main street), the chain restaurants, jewelry stores, and two shopping malls made clear that it was quite obviously a cruise ship port city. Nevertheless, we walked from one end to the other and back again (about 2 miles round trip), stocked up on the requisite magnet and keychain, and enjoyed the carless and colorful street.

I also took a ton of pictures. I'd intentionally left my DSLR at home for this trip (which turned out to be the right choice), but I did bring my Diana Mini, my new(ish) 35mm plastic-body toy camera. There weren't a ton of opportunities to use it while wandering around the resort, but downtown Playa del Carmen proved to be the perfect place to take it out for a walk.

This was my third roll of film with this camera (see the first one here) and easily my favorite. The pictures have a rich and creamy quality to them, and though I had some resolution issues scanning them into my computer, in person they are quite vivid and noiseless. There's also that magic of snapping a photo and having no idea if it'll come out or not. I made the bold choice to not use my iPhone once while walking around the town - so if something had gone wrong with the loading or the processing, I'd have no pictures from that day. Granted, nothing too monumental took place that day - we ambled around a tourist trap that looked like every other Caribbean town I'd ever been to. But still, I took a chance. I obviously will not be retiring either my iPhone or my DSLR, but I'll have a bit more confidence from now on to maybe leave those other cameras back in my bag in the spirit of the photographic unknown.

These photos were shot on a Lomography Diana Mini Camera with Photo Porst Chrome X (100) film. The negatives were processed at one location (let's call it Wrong-Aid) and developed at the Lomography Lab when I realized that the first place couldn't deal with the alternative square sizing of the pictures.

this purple city

This past Christmas, my boyfriend's parents gave me a gift certificate to Adorama (a local camera store). I knew immediately what I was going to get - the Lomography Diana Mini, a 35mm film camera that I had my eyes set on for quite some time. Like many (many) amateur photographers, I grew up using film cameras but switched over to digital pretty much as soon as I could get my hands on an affordable model. If the shoeboxes of photos that still lie underneath my bed in my parent's house are any indication, I stopped regularly using film sometime around 2003/2004; incidentally, I distinctly remember spending about five hours in a Best Buy as I carefully poured over and picked out the prized camera that would accompany me on my semester abroad in Europe.

But the thrill of analogue photography has stayed with me all these years - there are obviously a million reasons why digital photography is much easier/cheaper/convenient/etc. than traditional film photography, but I will never forget the magic that I felt while developing my own film in the darkroom of the community college where I took a black and white film class one summer.

So back to the Diana camera. I'd been looking to get back in to analogue photography, if not to the extent that I install a darkroom in my bathroom, then at the least I shoot a couple rolls here and there just to see what happens. And in the true spirit of "see what happens," I unearthed a few rolls of film that I had been carting around in a box since quite possibly the last millennium. Now, I KNOW that I had not treated those rolls with any care or concern. I'm sure that at one point I kept them in the freezer like any good photographer knows to do, but after half a dozen moves across almost as many states, those rolls didn't stand a chance. But rather than throw them away, I decided to see what, if any, kind of pictures they'd produce.

The first chance I got to play with my old film in my new camera was during the New York Blizzard That Wasn't. Since I was blessedly given a day off from rehearsal, I was able to wander around the neighborhood and photograph all three inches of snow. The resulting pictures aren't great - they're blown out, they're not framed particularly well, and they all have a slightly purple/grey tinge to them. But I kind of love them! They seem to show an Astoria from another era, one that has yet to be hit with Photoshop and immediately perfect Instagram filters.

I used up the end of the roll on a day trip to the Dia art museum in Beacon, NY. Not too many of those images turned out (I think it was too dark in most of the galleries), but I did get one cool picture from a Richard Serra installation. I'm not 100% sure if the quality of the pictures is a result of the old film, the novelty-nature of the camera, or (most likely) a combination of both those factors, but I have another roll out for processing and am working my way through a third, and am so happy I rekindled my love of analogue photography. I just can't for the life of me figure out what took me so long!

These photos were shot on a Lomography Diana Mini camera with Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400 film, developed at my local Duane Reade, and scanned into my computer; none of the pictures have been digitally retouched.