Shooting With The Diana Instant Camera
I took a couple of weeks off from this newsletter and that's okay. Things have been very mellow. We went on a little overnight trip to Bar Harbor/Acadia earlier this week and it was fine even though the kids were miserable. They hate nature and fun and relaxing apparently.
I wanted to get back into the habit of writing the newsletter regularly because business will start picking up again next week. I've been wanting to post about this fun little instant camera I've been playing with but things have been quiet and winter-y so I beyond initial tests I haven't been able to use it much. I'm sure I'll use it a lot more next months since I'll actually be traveling and shooting with people. For now you get a lot of shots of sad winter-scapes and my kids.
I got this camera - The Lomography Diana Instant from the very talented photographer Kate Grout. She is a master at getting great results from Polaroid/instant cameras and Lomography's quirky line of plasticy "toy" cameras. I started shooting Lomo cameras about 15 years ago, long before I knew what I was doing. First there was the kind of terrible Holga, then The medium format Diana, then a bunch of gimmicky 35mm cameras like fisheye, panoramic, and sequential multi-frame cameras. The Holga and The Diana were cheaply produced Chinese cameras from the 60s that had been long forgotten before Lomography started reproducing them. The lenses of the cameras were made of plastic so they had weird distortions and interesting character. The cameras often broke or had light leaks. They were great cameras to do experimental stuff with and their limitations and unreliability made the picture-taker open up and work less preciously. I had fun running around making messed up but dreamy-looking pictures but I inevitably dropped and broke all of my Lomo gear. Flash forward to now when I didn't even know that Dianas were still being made until I saw that Kate was selling an instant/instax version of the Diana. I had to try it out figuring that it would be fun to play around with during the off-season.
I had a hell of a time finding film for it. It takes Fujifilm Instax Square film, which I guess was popular a few years ago but now not so much. Stores stopped stocking it and I tried to order some and many retailers were back-ordered. Everyone restocked at the same time so after waiting a few weeks, trying to order from multiple sources I was inundated with maybe too many rolls of film.
The camera is hilariously hard to use. Aside from being a whole different process (I've wasted about a dozen frames because I left the lens cap on) it's hard to get the exposure right. The internet told me that the shutter is set at 1/125 and the film is 800 iso. The aperture can be changed but is inexact. I have an external light meter, and it helps a lot, but I still have to do a lot of trial and error.
Sometimes it turns off in the middle of a picture coming out and then really interesting things happen, like this:
I don't think I'll be bringing this to any weddings but I'll definitely try it with other portrait sessions. I think it could work really well for photographing people. The format is so small and the dynamic range is so poor that landscapes aren't great to shoot most of the time.
It's definitely meant for a younger audience, there's a selfie mirror built into the front. I had to try it out even though I'm not a big selfie guy.
The target audience is young, but not too young. My kids hate waiting for the picture to show up and REALLY hate waiting for me to fuss with it before taking their picture.
Overall, I love the lo-fi, dreamy aesthetic, I hate the headaches it gives me. It'll be a fun tool to use this year and when I drop it, smashing it into million pieces like I've done to all my other Lomography cameras, I'll be a little sad.