Poladroid: The Instant Digital Polaroid

Poladroid is a lovely bit of software that allows you to pop in any digital photo and it converts it into a Polaroid 600 format with a vignette, soft focus and some other lovely 600 film traits. when you click on the icon a Polaroid camera pops up on your desktop which you can then drag and drop in image onto, the famous Polaroid 600 noise then follows and the image slowly develops in front of you on your desktop. You can even only do batches of ten photos at a time!

these are three images from my Diana Mini made into Poladroids, works well with the Diana as the pictures are already square format and have an old school look.

The software is available free at Poladroid.net

Oh hello There Instax Mini

Whilst Fujifilm have not really filled the void that Polaroid has left in the world of instant film, The Instax mini film does bring back some of the fun and charm that Polaroid type 500 and 600/1200/SX-70 type cameras gave to millions. The prints are smaller than Polaroids equivalent film (Type 500) but can still give you the excitement and that nostalgic "memory capture" feeling that instant film can produce.

The film itself produces very fun sharp-ish images with surprisingly vivid colours even when using the flash.

I picked up one of the older model cameras on eBay for about £14 and a pack of 20 films for £9.99, its already starting to make sense isn't it? for instant film that is quite cheap, so you can take the little thing around with you and snap away at your friends or favourite gnome without having to break the bank on a pack of TIP 20 pound for 8 shots silver tone film. Whilst TIP might be saying their PX-600 and PX-100 film is for artistic purposes the average person just wants to get some great memorys of them and there mates so maybe fuji mini can keep you happy until TIP produces a more user friendly and afordable film.

P.S. I still do think what TIP did in a year is incredible and the new interest they and other groups have created for instant film is priceless

Rich Tea Makes it to 1000 hits

Minor achievement I know but still I have a warm sense of pride, despite the fact at least 400 of those hits were probably me.

Here is a picture of me being happy with the 1000 hits along with some beautiful people and lovely multiple exposures on my Diana mini F+. So thanks to anyone who has stumbled upon this blog, your all very nice indeed.

Polaroid Land 320

The Polaroid Land 320 was a basic range finder model in the 300 series and is a great place to start using type 100 film as it is one of the only Polaroid Compatible films still in production by Fujifilm and called Fuji FP-100c, FP-100b or FP-3000b. I bought the camera on eBay for 18 pounds and the film cost me 9 so I was good to go when it all arrived! apart from the fact these cameras use an old type of battery that is very hard to come by. A lot of internet guides tell you to go to Maplins and buy a cheap battery holder for two AAA battery's or as I discovered, a much quicker and cheaper option is to simply sellotape a CR2 battery (of which any photographer will have at least one kicking about) to the battery terminals. Job done.

As I was quite excited to have an instant camera again after I had run out of type 600 and type 80 film a few months back I decided it was awkward family photo time and took some shots of my parents.

Mother Grew

Father Grew

I was massively impressed by the sharpness and warm colours the fujifilm FP-100c produced with the camera, I even managed to get a nice blur on the background with an f8.8 lens!

This is a great fun camera and I think I might do some nice B&W portraits soon enough

What I Get Up To

Waiting on some parts for my Olympus trip35 and for my Polaroid land 320 and Fuji mini (had a bit of a camera binge this week) to arrive so thought I would just post some stuff about some of the work I do as I am an art student after all.

I mostly do installation stuff based around the human figure using a range of materials like plaster. The figure below is supported by 120 coloured threads and the figure its self is 6ft

On this one I used the HDR technique

This is a little stop motion video showing how i made the figure in the top picture



I apologise for taking my top off in the video, I'm aware no one wants to see that but I didn't want to get plaster on my sex pistols t-shirt!

Fixing Aperture Blades On An Olympus Trip 35

I bought an Olympus Trip 35 from Denham car boot today for £1, They have become an absolute cult camera and were in production for over 20 years with 10 million being sold but sadly by 2010 a lot of them like mine require a service. On my Trip the aperture blades were stuck shut and required cleaning and re-lubricating I used this amazing guide that I found here.

The camera itself is quite easy to take apart and clean the view finder as the top of it is simply a bit of electrical tape that you can lift up and stick in a cotton ear swab to get rid of any dust.

The aperture blades are over the last element of the lens and it took me quite some time to unscrew the various focusing and exposure/aperture setting rings and other lens elements to get down to them. in the guide it states to use lighter fluid to clean the blades and graphite to lubricate them, I used acetone household solvent and to make the graphite lubricant I scraped a Stanley knife across a 3B pencil to get a fine powder which works perfectly. annoyingly I rounded the head of one of the tiny screws without realising and had to carefully drill it out but by doing this I slightly warped the thread of the focusing lens element so have had to purchase a new one for a fiver.

hope to get some results from this lovely camera up soon!

Large Format camera + Cheap scanner

(After a bit of a break I'm back to the blog, and will be getting on to doing the TTV guide very soon.)
This isn't one of the newest things to hit photography, but is still incredibly interesting and innovative. The Scanner Photography project is a photography process using a flat bed scanner instead of a digital image sensor or film, the scanner is strapped onto a large format camera body to create a contraption capable of taking over 150 mega pixel images depending on the maximum resolution of the scanner used,even cheap scanners can scan up to 2400dpi which creates a huge image

because of the way scanners work, there is no discrete exposure time. The sensor move across gathering light instead of exposing the whole image sensor at once, this adds a completely new element to picture taking that is individual to this type of camera.

Mike Golembewski is a leader in this type of photography and has a very interesting website which sadly it would appear has not been updated in quite some time, but if you look on flickr there is quite a lot of experimentation still going on with this.