Lo-Fi Photography

A couple of weeks ago I was out for a family day out to the seaside at West Mersea, and decided to try out the Lomo Diana F+ camera I've had since Christmas.

So in went the 120 roll film (200ASA slide film), and joy of joys NO BATTERIES! I shot my 12 pictures at the large size and was then ready to hunt on-line for processing services.

I chose thephotoshoponline.co.uk to process my film. It turns out that slide film is more pricey than negative film would have been: for processing and scanning I ended up paying £12.95 + 1st class postage £2.70. I got back my 120 slide film as strips and a CD with the scanned images as 5MB .jpg files. The results are technically horrible in many ways, yet I quite like them too. Here are a few of the better ones...

The harbour at West Mersea.

Crab botherers on the quayside.

Local lads diving in the harbour.

Whoops, accidental double exposure!

Reflection in the sail-makers workshop.

So it's an expensive way to get some dark and grubby images, but I think I'll be having another go at this soon. Whatever the results, the process is lots of fun; very few controls on the camera, random results, delayed gratification and (did I say this already?) ... NO BATTERIES.

I've got some more rolls of the slide film to get through, then I might buy some negative film and shoot the smaller images (16 per roll) to get slightly better value. (Negative film at the lab I used is quicker and cheaper than slide film, 1-day processing is quoted at £7.95+postage for the process & scan) I'm also toying with the idea of dusting off my 35mm SLR too just for more analogue kicks...