I *love* instant film. It’s always magical to have a photo develop infront of your eyes. Having a physical photograph that you can stick on your wall, give to a friend or put in an album is great too. With digital I end up with so few printed photographs, everything is on the computer.

This is my Fuji Instax camera, it takes the Fujifilm Instax Instant Film which is easy to get hold of. The negative thing about it is that it’s huge! It’s so bulky and I don’t take it out as much as I would like because of that. I am tempted to get one of the smaller Instax cameras that are more handbag sized.

I got this, and a lot of my other cameras, at a carboot sale. They’re great places for picking up stuff like this for next to nothing. I think this one cost a couple of pounds.

The colours are great, so deep and bright. Some instant films tend to look faded but this stuff is lovely. I have just loaded it with some very old expired film so I expect that might have lost some of it’s colour over time. I’ll post the results soon.

One of my favourite things about using film for photography is the joy of double exposures. I took these photos with my Nikon F55 which is a film SLR that you can pick up for next to nothing. It uses all the lenses that my D300 does so I get all the joy of film with all the modern technology that comes with digital. I used slide film and got it cross-processed at Photographique.

For these photos I shot the whole roll of film around the city of Bristol where I live. I then rewound the film and put it through my camera again, photographing flowers and leaves and other naturey stuff. It’s pretty simple to do, there’s a tool for hooking the end of the film out of the canister once it’s wound back in or you can take it to your local photographic developing shop and they should be kind enough to do it for you.

There are lots more here if you click on the thumbnails.

This week I thought I’d share with you one of the more ‘novelty’ type of cameras that we have. The SuperSampler takes four photos over two seconds to create a 4 frames within one photograph. You can also change the settings so it takes all the photos in 0.2 seconds but I never use that setting as the results aren’t so interesting. The camera has a fixed shutterspeed so you can only use it in good light. I used Fuji Sensia 200 film in it for these photos and had it cross-processed.

You get different effects if you move the camera as it’s taking the photos,

compared with keeping the camera still.

Mostly this camera is great for being silly with!

(more…)