The Real Diana

Following up on my posts on Android's Diana emulator app, Retro Camera, I wanted to put up some examples of the real thing, taken in Rome in 2006 and Paris in 2009. These are all shot on color slide film and cross-processed. 

For the uninitiated, the Diana is an extremely chintzy plastic toy camera manufactured in China from roughly the 1960's and '70's. It shoots 120 roll film, but gives a smaller 4.5cm x 4.5cm image than is usual for that format. It's famous/infamous for its sometimes-expressive light leaks and especially for its incredibly primitive single-element plastic lens. As you can see, it leads to vignetting and overall soft focus, especially around the edges. My camera is remarkably free of light leaks, so you don't see any of that here- I would probably tape them up it did have them. Mine does not like Fuji film, however, so sometimes I get things like the bottom image of the Tritone fountain in Rome, where the film didn't wind properly, and allowed light to leak in at the edges when I changed rolls. The numbers you see are reflected from the paper backing of the 120 film. 

Mine was given to me by my brother Scott- he has found many of them at the Goodwill over the years, usually picking them up for about a dollar. They sell used on Ebay for around $40-60, and you can now buy them new from Freestyle for about $40. 

 

More after the break:  

Droid Retro Camera app is fun, sucks.

Right, so I found an "app" on my new Garmin phone, "Retro Camera" by Android, and thought the thing might actually be a Diana killer, at least on the road. Currently when I travel I take a brick of film and at least two or three cameras, including the fragile, imprecise, and wildly unpredictable, plastic Diana (given to me by my brother Scott). I love the quality it produces, but I've been getting a little impatient with the chance element it forces on you. In my old age I want control and I want results, damn it. When I discovered that the Droid thing actually does a pretty reasonable job of emulating that, while being much easier to shlep around and use spontaneously, I opted to use it as my main fooling-around camera while hanging in Paris, Brussels, and Edinburgh during my 2010 Europe tour. The results were delightful, right up until I discovered that the high-resolution setting was disabled by default, and the pictures were coming out at ~2"x2" @ 300dpi- no good for anything but the web, or snapshot-size prints. The irritating thing is that I had set it for high-resolution, but there was a buried second setting that disabled that choice, resulting in... a bunch of pretty crap for my Facebook page. I'll let you know how the actual high-resolution pictures work out- until then this app is on probation.

A few pictures from Paris and Brussels- there are more on my Facebook page that will never be used for anything else: