- Real Name
- Jennifer Sharpe
I think a bigger part of this is that you can buy a really good old film camera for hardly anything. Very attractive if you're a student with not much money. Of course the film and developing costs add up a lot more than shooting digital.
Back in the film days, (daze), it was sometimes fun to pick up an antique camera and see what I could do with it. You could still get some 616 film back then. Or if film was not available you could cut pieces of sheet file so you could make one shot and then go back to the darkroom. I found the results never lived up to my expectations. Why? They were all too good. They looked perfectly normal. No soft focus, no light leaks, no defects. To get those things you needed to use something truly dismal. The Diana camera was made for just this purpose. Terrible cheap construction, barely workable. No controls as all. Often the body parts fitted together so poorly you needed black tape to cover the gaps. The lens was exceedingly cheap and it made some low quality images. I still have one in the original box in case you desperately want to buy one Not as fun as a pinhole camera which you made yourself.
Another fad from the film days. The idea was to discover something in your pictures you did not in any way create or frame or see at the time of shooting. This was done by strapping your camera on your back and using a shutter release cable to trip the shutter. You would walk around and see something interesting in front of you. Then, without looking back, you would take a picture behind you. Look forward, take a picture backward. Then you would go to the darkroom, develop your film, and see what discoveries might be in store. Mostly a lot of rubbish. Occasionally a passerby looking quizzically at the camera. I think the recent pictures, selfies, made by apes using phone cameras are more interesting.
HAHAHA! I have a Diana camera but despite all my best efforts, and really my lack of time - which is why I got into digital in the first place, you know, young kids, a job... - I still haven't done as much film as I want to. I even got a toy twin lens reflex last year which I constructed myself, so fascinating to put together a shutter!, and a cardboard pinhole camera, which I have yet to put together, in anticipation of film. I found our old SLR Minolta film camera too (I think my old film point and shoot from the '80s is around somewhere, my husband has one too, because, egad, we have photos shot on film all the way up to 2009). We even have a Brownie from my husband's parents - probably finding film somewhere around for that will be an adventure... The only thing I've done in the past few years with film is use a Lomokino for making some very short motion picture film with 35mm regular old camera film. Scanned that, so beautiful, and full of flaws, used it in a few of my videos along with digital footage. All in good time. I gain more time as my children grow older... yaaaaaay
With experimental anything there are no rules. That's my thing. Combine old with new, with a solid emotional and intellectual basis - so fun and so... well, who you are.
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