Week 28 – Having fun with my new “Toy” camera ……

To be honest when I say “Toy” camera in the title that is a little misleading really as the Diana F+ may be a piece of plastic but after shooting my 1st roll with it yesterday I am blown away with what it produces.

Unlike my Holga there are a few more options that sort of give you a little bit of control over the image you want to make.

You have 2 shutter speeds B and N which equates to approx 1/60th  along with 4 aperture settings that have the symbols cloud, cloud/sun, sun and Pinhole.

The focusing is zone based with 3 settings.I have had very hit or miss results with my Holga (mainly miss to be honest) and after seeing the results of the Diana on the web I thought I would get one and give it a go.

It was great fun to shoot and I did not alter the settings much from the cloud/sun setting as I was using HP5 and it was pretty overcast.

The overall exposure of all the frames was very good with the only exceptions being the few frames I shot in Pinhole mode which 2 were over exposed an the other very under exposed.The main problem with the Pinhole setting is that even though you can put the camera on a tripod you still have to activate the shutter by hand as it does not have a cable release setting so the frames were quite blurred.

Next time I will try Pinhole by using the lens cap as a shutter rather that just holding then releasing the shutter button (tip I read on the net).Anyway needless to say I absolutely love the camera and the images it makes, the centre of the frame is lovely and sharp with nice blurry edges and variable vignetting.

I will say that I scanned and then processed these in Lightroom and apart from spotting out the dust/hairs I tweaked the Highlight/Shadows a bit (not to much) and a bit of clarity.

I am looking forward to shooting some colour film next and will post the results. I am not sure if my Holga will be getting as much use as this little beauty and if anyone fancies trying out a “Toy” camera I recommend this highly.

Thanks for looking…..

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