Diana Overview
In Hawaii, I experimented with Diana more than I ever have before which resulted in some of the coolest pictures that have ever come out of my little plastic friend. To explain how I created this weirdness, I should probably first explain how Diana works:
Diana is a plastic camera that uses medium format, 120mm film. It has two settings for taking different sized photos: 16 and 12 (hence the name of China in 12 Frames). On the 16 frame setting, you need a little mask inside the camera to make the photos rectangle shaped; without that mask the camera is meant to take 12 square photos. Everything is manual, so you wind the film after taking a picture. There is a little, translucent red window on the back of the camera that lets you see which frame you're on. Depending on what type of film you're using, you can see different icons between the numbers as you wind the film. Fuji brand film has little black dots that get consecutively smaller as you get closer to the next number, Kodak film just says "Kodak" right before the next number. Unlike most 35mm cameras, you don't have to wind the film perfectly to the next frame, you have full control where you want to expose the film. You also have to manually control the focus of the lens and the f-stop.Basically, with these pictures I did everything wrong. First, I put it on the wrong setting. I set it to take 16 pictures without the 16 frame mask, under normal conditions this would cause a slight overlap from one frame to the next. To increase the overlap and double exposure, I also didn't fully wind the film to the next frame. I did something similar a couple weeks ago with the photos of my kids class, but this time I wound the film much more haphazardly. Sometimes I'd wind it 2/3 of the way, sometimes half, other times just slightly. I did keep an eye on the exposure and focal length, but most of the time I did that wrong as well (on purpose, mostly). Since I was intentionally exposing the film multiple times, it wasn't important to have the camera set up correctly for every shot. If every little thing was perfectly in focus, certain things could end up being distracting.
There are a lot of pictures, so I divided them into three sets. Here we go...
