This little dog of mine. He is so silly and so adorable.

For Christmas this past year I got a nice scanner I had been fawning over. It’s a huge Epson Perfection v500 Photo scanner that can scan slides and 35mm film. I figured not having to pay to have the photo lab scan in my negatives would motivate me to work more with film.

For the inaugural scan, I busted out some old negatives from my college photography classes. Talk about uninspired, there weren’t very many that I deemed worthy of being scanned in for the world to see. We’ll blame it on being forced to take up to ten rolls of film at a time. Even if I bracketed that’s a lot of pictures to take, and there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the small mountain town that I went to school in. You can only take so many pictures of snow and trees before you run out of ideas and I never was (Read: still am not) huge on studio/portrait photography.

This was probably the best picture I took in college. What I like about it is how normal it seems at first, you think “Oh, a door with some interesting light patterns on it, how nice.” It’s only after a few seconds of staring that you notice the creepy hand reaching out. It completely changes the mood of the photo. I have a non-dust covered print of it matted that I will eventually get framed.

I actually took these photos for my mom and not for a class project. She had recently inherited this old tractor from my great-grandfather who used it for years upon years farming on the North Carolina coast.

These were for a project, I don’t even remember what the assignment was, but Chris and I found these old masks at a Big Lots and thought they were just cheesy enough to photograph. Please ignore the dust on these, gah.

I’m crazy about cameras—particularly toy cameras. I love the simplicity of them versus my DSLR. There are often very few settings on these little guys: type of light, frame size, and that’s about it. They’re constructed of lightweight plastic so it’s easy to throw one into my purse and have it on the ready to snap away. Although I would kill for a sturdier version of my Holga—love that thing.

I’m also a sucker for bright colors and anything nautical or covered in squid, so when I saw this new camera from Lomography I had to have it. My review is a little late, it took me a while to finish off the roll since winter hit (my camera hibernation period, ha) but I preordered a camera sans flash from their first series. I have the navy blue Sea Pride one below, it has a squid on the back… of course it does.

You see, the gimmick with these is that they’re actually made from old sardine cans. I love it, so precious. Since the initial release they’ve put out all kinds of awesome designs: a pattern edition, a metal edition (do this with holga, please!), a Seoul edition, and a Virginia is for Lovers edition. You can check them out on the Lomography website here.

Settings and Controls
So on to the details! The La Sardina is a wide angle lens toy camera that uses 35mm film. Following suit with other toy cameras in my collection it has very few settings. Two focus options: close up or far away, indicated on the lens by a bug (so cute) and a group of three people, respectively. It has a bulb setting for long exposures, a normal setting, and a multiple exposure setting for uhh taking multiple exposures. It also features a rewind dial and a lens cap. I cannot tell you how happy I am about having a lens cap that actually stays on. A lot of toy cameras don’t come with caps or they have caps that fall off all the time and of course, there are no replacements available for purchase. Of course you could argue that scratches on your lens just add to the character of the camera but having a cap is important to me. It has two tripod mounts and a tunnel viewfinder, which means the viewfinder is not connected to the lens, so what you see is an approximation of what you’re photographing. When photographing subjects up close you may experience extreme parallax error, which basically means what you’re seeing is not what you’re photographing. Over time the more you use the camera the more you’ll be able to adjust to correct.

Final Verdict
I have always heard wonderful things about color slide film so I went to my local camera shop and asked for a suggestion. I walked out with a roll of Kodak Elitechrome 100 color slide film, which has now sadly been discontinued. You should still be able to purchase it for a few months, so if you haven’t tried it out I would highly suggest picking up a roll or two.

The film was pretty easy to load, though the door on the back of the camera can be tricky to close. There’s a little lip that the door has to latch on to and it doesn’t do this naturally, you have to force it. It took a few tries but eventually I had the film loaded and the door tightly secured. The first thing you’ll notice when you look through the tunnel viewfinder is that woo boy, this is a super wide angle. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t shoot with wide angle lenses very often but it felt like the whole world opened up and I could suddenly fit everything in frame. It was awesome. I really had no issues shooting with the camera, the rewind dial worked perfectly, the shutter was responsive, overall no hiccups.

When I tried to remove the film however… I thought I was ripping it up. The dial was so hard to turn I thought surely I was doing something wrong so I quickly googled instructions on how to rewind the film to remove it. Sure enough, I was doing it right so kept at it. By the time I was done my fingerprints were sanded away from the notches on the rewind dial. Seems like every camera I get from Lomography has rewind or advance issues. This is a pretty standard feature for a camera. I dunno why they can’t seem to make it more smooth. My Holga is plastic and it rewinds/advances smoothly so I don’t think it’s because of the materials being used. It’s always very concerning for me when I have to forcibly rewind film like that, it feels like I’m ripping up my film. No bueno.

The pictures themselves were kind of a disappointment. The film was awesome, colors were lovely—skies were super awesome blue, grass was super awesome green. I think the failure in the pictures is a combination of my inexperience with extreme wide angle lenses and the quality of the camera in general. Out of 36 pictures there’s not one that I’m really excited about. I almost never center the subject or focal point of my images, but it’s definitely a must with an extreme wide angle, there’s a very small window in the middle of the frame that will be in focus and every thing outside of that will distort and blur. So subjects have to be in the middle. That just doesn’t provide the variety I desire.

I would still recommend this camera, but only for landscape photography: mountains, skyscrapers, parks, nature etc. Avoid people, or smaller objects. Below are a few of the shots that weren’t super offensive. The last one is an example of how not to photograph people with this camera. Keep ‘em in the center!

The hubs and I have been itching to get out of town for a while, so a three day weekend/mini-vacation was in order. The beach bum in me desires to shove toes into sand and splash about, so we made our way down to Charleston for a Double Feature! First, on Friday night we had the pleasure of hearing the ever-so-talented Aaron Draplin give a talk on design. I left cursing up a storm, all inspired and shit—a personality like his is liable to rub off on just about anyone. More on that though on my Friday post. Second, we spent some time at the beach. Last time we visited Charleston we made the mistake of trying to go to Folly Beach… on 4th of July weekend. This time we hit up Sullivan’s Island which was much more our style. It was quiet and it was gray—storm clouds hovered ominously and there was the occasional sprinkle of rain but it was a nice way to spend a Saturday. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Also, I should probably just rename this column “Pictures of my husband and dog.” Seriously, but I can’t help if they’re so photogenic!

First off, I am woefully bad at photographing people. I have no idea how to give direction, and when I try to make my subject laugh… well, I just end up making baby noises at them until they cry-laugh. In general, I avoid photographing people unless they ask me to. I always say yes, because lord knows I need the practice. Then panic sets in and I spend hours rifling through photography blogs trying to find inspiration.

Thankfully, my husband is one person I’m pretty comfortable photographing—so when he asked me to take some pictures of him for his new website I wasn’t too concerned. He’s pretty photogenic if you ask me, but I might be ever so slightly biased.

The last shot is some graffiti that was inside the abandoned house we shot around. It’s lyrics from a Bright Eyes song.

You can view the fullsize images on my flickr.