Tag Archives: camera

Shoot a Roll in a day

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All the cool kids are doing it. 

What do I mean?  35mm of course.  Remember that stuff we used before there were phones that could make toast, give you relationship advice and clean your car on a Sunday morning?  I love some stuff about the 2012-World.  The fact I can get out of bed at 3am, if I so choose, and go and buy authentic ingredients to make a lamb Tikka Biryani.   The fact I don’t have to read complicated small-print timetables anymore because Google tells me when the train is coming.  And that I can go to the pub for an evening without getting COPD.

But then I dislike some stuff too.

The fact nobody can spell anymore.  That I have about forty TV channels and there’s still nothing on, and that petrol costs more than saffron infused angel’s tears.

And the death of film.

Film photography is still cheap despite what Jessops tells you, I buy film for less than a pound and process it to CD for £2.  Film photography is a 150 year old tradition, making images the way our grandfathers did.  We can even use the cameras they used, got off eBay for £2 instead of the hundreds they spent.  It’s science happening in your hands, its magical stuff.  Light burning into chemical emulsion, a moment, an experience recorded.  Not for your computer screen or a low res Facebook album, but to slip into a book or bottom draw to discover in ten years time, so you can spend a Sunday afternoon remembering the fun you had.  So shoot a roll in a day.  Buy a film camera for a pound, get some film from the pound shop and go on a picnic with your family.  One of the nice things about photography is you can’t take any photos sitting watching TV, you have to get up and go out and do something relatively exciting.

Here are a few I took today.

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The new Photography

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Now there’s a lomography gallery shop in Manchester – with an already strong following – I decided to address the phenomena that is Lomography.

So film is dead! Long live digital!  Kodak is going bust (seriously) and 126 and APS film is no longer available.

But wait – some fine marketing chaps from Austria have decided to repackage film photography and sell it back to us with a different name – lomography.  And this time folks, it’s ridiculously expensive.  Now I don’t want to be full of hate, lomography is also a very huge international community and the website, and aficionados don’t really go to extremes to stop that community conversing about all the very many short cuts, and economy options, which achieve the same results, so good luck to them.

Here’s my guide to lomography

Lesson 1

Lomography (shortened to Lomo) is named after Lomo plc, a Russian camera producers functioning out of St. Petersburg since the war (The Fiat of the camera world you might say).  Their cameras couldn’t compete with the super-ace German and Japanese SLR cameras which got crisp, amazing photos so they didn’t try– instead they made super cheap toy/plastic cameras for the masses.  They made the Smena range and the LCA, some of the most widely used and accessible cameras in the world.  Then one day two chaps in Austria realised you could get some cool effects using these old cameras, that you couldn’t with digital without a lot of Photoshop magic.  So they decided to become the agent for Lomo plc, create Lomo AG and market themselves cleverly.

Lesson 2

The glitch is Lomo plc made pretty lo-tech cameras.  I think the Russian word is ‘rubbish’.  They were famous for their flaws, but also for their ease of use and simplicity.  So Lomo AG capitalise on the flaws by making the cameras seem really cool, hip, energetic and rad.  Only now they’re £100 instead of £5 to pay for the burgeoning marketing bill  …So let me get this straight.  These products have flaws, but the flaws became popular and now they’re more expensive than the top of the range Japanese film cameras?  Yep.

Lesson 3

So it’s like this.  You get a decent Toshiba DVD player and it plays DVDs really quietly, never jumps and has lots of cool buttons you never really use apart from play, stop and pause.  Then you get a smart-price DVD player for less than ten pounds and it grinds and spins and sounds like a plane taking off as the machine tries to search for the DVD inside it.  Then someone reckons the smart-price DVD is pretty cool because the grinding and the jumping, and the fact you have to have the TV volume loud because the spinning disc sounds like a chainsaw.  They say it’s nostalgic.  They triple the price, and then….they triple it again.  Now you can have authentic ‘retro’ DVD experiences.  This is Lomo.

Lesson 4

Next logical question – hey can I go back to ASDA and get the original cheap smart price DVD player?

Answer – of course you can, go on eBay, Lomo PLC is still trading.  Buy a Smena, the downside is these cameras are heavy so you’re going to pay £15 postage from the Ukraine.  £5 camera plus £15 postage is still better than £100 though I guess.

Lesson 5

But let’s say you didn’t have the £20 so you did some thinking and thought hey – the cheaper, crappier the camera the more flawed it will be, the less perfect.  If I want nostalgic grinding DVDs and a laser that never finds the film and always says ERROR but I don’t get the smart price one, maybe I can just buy the cheapest nastiest one and get the same results.

So (DVD players aside) you went on eBay and bought the nastiest, plastic 35mm you could find.  You got it for £2 including postage?  Now you’re saving.  Alternatively go in the attic and unpack your granddad’s old camera collection, what’s he got?  An OM1, FM2, Yashika Electro?  Even better buy battery and film and learn how to use these babies but these are well made so you won’t get any silly effects.

Lesson 6

Finally – you join the Lomo community – which in their defence is full of free, easy advice to help you DIY and botch jobs together without buying the expensive gear.  And go into the Lomo shop with your plastic toy camera in your pocket.  Use their images for inspiration.  When the foppish dandy swaggers over looking at your Primark jeans with distain, tell him you’re just browsing.  “Why not look at the LCA, he might say, just £200 for retro, vintage, nostalgic brilliance.”

                “Erm, no, like I say, I’m just browsing.’  He’ll leave you alone eventually.

                Then start your Lomo journey.

You might want to have fun with Redscale film (Lomo price £12) follow the link and make it yourself

You might use expired film, about £1 or £1.50 per roll on eBay.  Expired film also gives crappy, flawed effects.

If your £2 camera isn’t giving the light flares and the crazy effects – drop it on a hard floor a few times, maybe break the back off and tape it back on.  Stick sweetie wrappers over the lens to colour your pictures.  Take the film out of the canister and scratch it, draw pictures on it with a nail, leave it on a radiator, dip it in coca cola, basically experiment.

Also developing is expensive with Lomo - £11 for 35mm (£2.80 in ASDA) and £12 for 120 roll (£8.50 with Fujifilm online)

Good luck!

Merry Christmas Guys!

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I was thinking this morning about what I love the most about photography and what I came up with was something I haven’t been able to do for years.

This week was the first week of the Christmas holidays from my main job at university, and at Christmas I tend to ease off on the writing (prose anyway, last Christmas I wrote about 250 poems) unlike last year I have assignments to do for my MA so the luxury of stopping writing altogether for a few weeks isn’t there – but it does become less of a priority.  i think it’s healthy to have a break from something that you’re very close to once in a while.  But, not content to sit and stare at Only Fools and Horses Christmas Specials for the umpteenth time I do replace writing with something else just as consuming.  This year photography.

Guilty confession:  This week I bought 3 cameras on Ebay, and would have bought another 2 if I hadn’t bid too low.

Yep, I’m hooked.  I’ll probably show pictures of the lomo beauties when they arrive and fill you in on the juicy features.  Hopefully I won’t lose my writer-followers, I’ll be back on that in the new year, and with cutaway opening on January 1st it’s going to be a busy period.  But for now, it’s me and my 3/soon to be 6 cameras.

And I was thinking back to what I loved when I first did photography proper at university and it was the darkroom.  I used to shoot a film in order to get in there.  If anyone hasn’t done it, basically you lock yourself in a tiny store cupboard, tun off all the lights, ALL of them and crack the cartridge that holds the film open. The film unrolls all over the place while you try to find the end in the pitch black.  Then you have a spool type thing which you feed the film onto – I remember this being quite tricky.  Then the spool – hopefully correctly filled – (don’t turn the light on to check) goes onto a dipper and is plunged into the first bath of chemicals whilst you watch the luminous hands of the clock.  You stand there for ten minutes in the silence and darkness waiting for the time to reach.  Then it is swapped into another bath to fix it, then a third bath to rinse it.  Each time you occasionally swish it around to make sure the fluid reaches each part of the film.  It was such an adventure to scientifically retrieve the art you had made – digital seems so cold in comparison.  I think once it’s in the fix bath you can turn the red light on, but I never used to use any, staying in darkness till the end.  Then you can view the negative images on the film – but you dry it first in a drying cabinet for a few hours.  After that – it’s to the enlarger, basically shining a bright light through the negative onto a piece of light-sensitive paper – again in the dark – and exposing it for long enough to get the true contrasts. 

I miss this process so much – I work at a university which has since abandoned its dark rooms because of digital photography.  I can’t help getting excited though when I go on the lomography website and see all the cool cameras and film (but never buy there, their prices are about 50%-100% higher than the cameras are worth).  Watch this space is all I’ll say.

Let me know if you remember/love film, or still shoot in film?  What is it about old photos that have a nostalgia about them, and when you see the lomography galleries everything seems so exciting and immediate.  Digital is too perfect sometimes.

Anyway – some news.  I’m off to post another blog on cutaway’s website after this to keep the fans hungry – we open soon, and whilst I think my co-editor will be happy to sit back and let the stories and poems trickle through the letterbox, I’m going to be tempted to read each one as they come.  It’s going to be like Christmas until March 1st!  Get over there and ‘like’ us if you haven’t already.  And check out Sammy Dee and Luby Lou’s blog posts to discover more information about us.

Also – if you’re a female (or even if you aren’t) another Creative Writing associate has started a fiction page over at  http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ a flash lifestyle and gossip magazine for women.  Email lucy@femalefirst.co.uk - she requests: Submissions no more than 1,000 words on the subject of new beginnings to coincide with the new year. This can be whatever you interpret it to be. Times new roman, size 12. So get submitting, Lucy is looking for poems and prose and art and photos, so if you’d like to publish something with her send it across – this is the first issue of the fiction page on the Female First Website – and I think her dead line is the middle of January.

Thanks for reading, and to all my followers and passersby MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Challenges continue, pizza, pictures, loves and hates.

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So the Project Day Zero continues – I’m chipping away at the easy ones.  Here’s me eating home made pizzas with friends no.12

And I’m wondering about number 94, get a new camera, my new phone has a camera and I’ve downloaded a retro-camera app.  Does it count? Some pictures I took this week with the app:

                                       

I’m loving lists this week so I thought I’d list some stuff apart from the 101 in 1001 list.  Funnily enough I just wrote a story called lists which used a long list as a device, as the things listed went on they represented the different elements of a life growing older, the plot was a mother looking back over her sons life after he had been killed.  So here’s 5 things I love and 5 I hate.  Would be a good place to say list your five loves and hates in the comments, but when I request comments I get none, and when I don’t I get loads.  See how you feel…..

I LOVE:

1. Melons in summer eaten stood in the kitchen with a tea towel in one hand and the juice all over my chin

2. Beer and ready salted crisps consumed in a beer garden

3. Drinking tea, black, no milk no sugar - thanks, don’t squeeze the bag, preferably use a pot.

4. Woody Allen and most things that he creates

5. The smell of fabric conditioner on laundry on a washing line

I HATE:

1. Google adsense and marketing which uses what I write on social networking sites, it freaks me out.

2. Radio DJs, and most radio

3. Being woken up by the phone ringing, or actually any kind of sudden wake up, doors knocking, alarms etc…

4. Dogs, dog violence, dog noise, dog-poo, dog hotels, dog beauty parlours and dog owners

5.  Parents who ignore their young childrens attempts at getting their attention *

* I have to add this.  The other day I was walking through my town towards the shops, behind me were a father and a mother a baby in a pram and a little girl of about seven or eight.  I heard the father mutter something to the mother then he crossed over and speeded up.  It was about eleven in the morning.  The little girl said, ‘Where’s daddy going mum?’ ‘To the pub.’ her mum replied.  I looked across at him with a more accusing eye now knowing that.  It was a weekday, 11am – no one should be in the pub, they shouldn’t even be open in my opinion.  This family were not high earning people, making a judgement on how they looked daddy might have been unemployed even.  So the little girl shouted, across the road and the traffic, ‘See you later daddy!’ as loud as her lungs could manage.  Then she shouted it again, and elicited a small wave from her dad.  It was just a raised hand, he didn’t turn back it was just like he was swotting a fly.  Then she shouted, ‘I love you daddy!’ no response.  He was walking faster and was about ten metres ahead of us all, but well within earshot.  ‘I love you daddy!’ she shouted again, and a third time and she got ignored.  Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, I was torn between carrying on about my business or following until he turned off down an alley and beating him into shape.  Either way the daughter benefitted nothing.  So Mr Ignorant father of Bolton, you know who you are, and you are number five in a list of pretty despised hates.

Just a quick mention for the other guys, we are building a mini-bloggers community all taking part in the Project Day Zero.  That’s what really got me interested because the official project day zero website looks pretty unrewarding, but I didn’t spend ages on it so I might be wrong.  See how the others are getting along with their projects using these links below:

http://manchestermeanders.wordpress.com/

http://kiwidutch.wordpress.com/about/101-things-in-1001-days/

http://sarsm.wordpress.com/101-in-1001/

http://thelaughinghousewife.wordpress.com/1011001-2/