In which we meet my new friends, Splash and Max Disappointment

Posted by admin on January 17th, 2010 filed in General, Life List, Neat things, Photography, Projects

As you may have noticed on my life list, I would like to try out some lomography.  The pictures from this style of photography are so surreal and dreamy, I just love them.   To take these pictures, you get this stuff at the store and put it in your camera.  What was it called?  Hmmm…  film?  Yeah, I think that was it.  Film.  Part of the fun of lomography is that you never know what’s going to come out of your roll of film until you get it developed.  I’m getting ahead of myself though.

The lomo camera that I really want is expensive, so I decided to build my own pinhole camera.  You can make this out of any sort of box, even an empty juice box.  Although I feel a little lame for doing so, I ordered a cardboard kit to make the box for my camera instead of making my own from scratch (Thanks, Lunar Groupe!).  So meet my camera, Splash, who is made from cardboard, glue, double sided tape, a shiny piece of metal, and stickers.  See the fish stickers?

Splash is a pinhole camera, which means there is no flash and all the light for the image is collected through a tiny hole.  I can expose each shot for as long or as little as I like.  One of the things that I really liked in college was when I did a semester in the observatory (back when I was sure astrophotography would be my life) and learned how telescopes and digital cameras work  Well, this project taught me how cameras with film work (although it’s pretty much what I expected).  So I finished the camera, loaded it up with film, and took a bunch of pictures.  At the end, I had no way to rewind the film without taking the back off the camera.  At night, I turned off all the hall lights, shut myself in the bathroom, turned the lights off in there, and took the film out in what I thought was complete darkness.  The film was left with Walmart for development.

Yesterday we went to pick up the film and met with Max Disappointment, who is kind of in-your-face mean.  See?

He put a smiley after the note explaining that none of my pictures came out because the film had been exposed to light!  Do you think Walmart will give me free stuff if I complain that a smiley is not a considerate emoticon for someone who just lost all her pictures?  Wouldn’t a sad face, with a little tear, and maybe a liquor bottle in which sorrows could be drowned, be more appropriate?  At least he didn’t charge me.

The light exposure means one of three things.

1.) My dark bathroom extracting method is flawed and light got in while I was taking the film out.

2.) The employee developing the film decided that since the pictures looked different (lomo pics aren’t like what you would hope for if you were trying for realism), they were obviously a mistake and he would not develop them.

3.) Light is leaking into Splash somewhere and the film was exposed while it was still in the camera.

Numbers one and three are the easiest for me to try to fix.  I think Splash has a date with a roll of black duct tape.  That should help keep the light out.

Maybe next time I’ll get under a blanket in a dark closet to roll the film.

I bought a four pack of film and I have used one roll.  If I don’t get this figured out by the end of three more rolls, I might have to call Splash a failed project and just wait until I can buy a camera.  This stuff is expensive!