A while ago a dear friend gave me Diana Mini as a gift (yes, lucky me! :D) for tak­ing pic­tures at her wed­ding. I haven’t used a film cam­era in ages, maybe since I was 16. I thought I would get impa­tient or even frus­trat­ed with not being able to see­ing results imme­di­ate­ly like with dig­i­tal cam­eras, but it was actu­al­ly a lot of fun! I cur­rent­ly have a roll in the cam­era that I start­ed on the night of Nuit Blanche, which was in ear­ly Octo­ber, and I’m still wait­ing to fin­ish it, but it almost feel joy­ful to wait to see the results. It makes the pic­tures and the moments they cap­ture feel more special.

Also! The Diana was actu­al­ly first made in Hong Kong in the 60s, which was where I was born (but not in the 60s :P) and makes me love it more :D I had some trou­ble with load­ing and wind­ing the film in the begin­ning (actu­al­ly, I still have some trou­ble load­ing, it’s not made of very stur­dy plas­tic and I’m always wor­ried that I would snap some­thing if I press too hard on any part). Parts of my first roll was ripped maybe because it was­n’t loaded prop­er­ly, but some­how it’s work­ing better.

So, any­way, here are a few that I think are par­tic­u­lar­ly cool :D

Pic­ture of Mike tak­ing a pic­ture. Actu­al­ly, when I’m walk­ing around with the Diana I find that I often get asked by strangers to take a pic­ture of me tak­ing a pic­ture, it’s kind of funny.

I think I had the cam­era on “bulb” mode or long expo­sure by mis­take. Kind of a dizzy­ing dream world, with the CN Tow­er in the back­ground! :D The biggest part of the fun with a “toy” cam­era like the Diana is the sur­prise I think, the hap­py accidents.

This was actu­al­ly tak­en on a kind of film for slides, which I did­n’t know at the time. The friend­ly staff at the pho­tog­ra­phy shop said it required “cross pro­cess­ing” to devel­op, and the results were AMAZING. I wish I can show you more pic­tures of it, but then it would be a total pho­to over­load and you would prob­a­bly get bored. So here’s one that I real­ly like, a cor­ner in a very quaint cafe.

This one was prob­a­bly my favourite of all the Diana pic­tures I have tak­en so far. One very neat thing one can do with the cam­era is mul­ti­ple exposures!

And now these ones are tak­en by Mike with a Minol­ta that he’s inher­it­ed from his uncle. It was a beau­ti­ful fall day at a near­by trail — look at the tree-lined path! I love the pic­tures that the Diana takes, but this is clear­ly a cam­era of a much bet­ter qual­i­ty. I real­ly like how they turned out :)

 

So, Mike had this bril­liant idea of one day tak­ing a trip in which we only take ana­logue pho­tos, with­out con­stant­ly tak­ing pic­tures with our phones and post­ing them on Insta­gram and such. Can­not wait until that hap­pens! :D

Will share more pic­tures when my cur­rent roll in the cam­era is devel­oped! Have a hap­py Thurs­day, everyone!