A week after starting my 52 week film project, my Leica camera suddenly broke. Thinking of out the box I found a disposable camera, although the results didn't go quite as planned.
So there I was all excited to start my 52 week project, having already shot 1 roll, developed a 'what film I should use per week' plan for the next 8 weeks or so, AND announced it to the world - then my camera decides to break (in technical terms the film advance lever got stuck).
Not wanting to stray from my target of shooting 1 film per week, I decided to very quickly find a Leica repair man and source another way of shooting film in the meantime. Then it came to me - a disposable camera! This project, after all, is about different types of film. I found a disposable camera through the website I buy most of my film here in Germany. This was a special Japanese import Fuji film 1600. Remember the ISO discussion? ISO 1600 is quite high and (should be) good for situations with less light.
However, the results that came back were, to put it politely, rubbish. As my developer said so directly "unfortunately the 35 mm Film was underexposed, also not all frames were exposed". That may have been a polite way of saying "you don't even know how to use a disposable camera". In hindsight, I didn't use the pop-up flash it came with enough and given the instructions were all in Japanese I probably missed the critical text "you must use flash on this all the time". Given most of my shots were at night....well they did not really come out. The daytime ones were OK though.
But, not all is lost. Back to my Leica - luckily I found a repair man, right here in Frankfurt. This guy (aka the camera legend) has been fixing all types of cameras for 55 years! He is based in the city, his shop is in a basement. Camera geek heaven indeed. He has more cameras than I have ever seen and knew immediately what the problem was. I guess he is busy enough as he scheduled it for repair in a week.
After a bit of a shock as to the price of the repair (although as he said anything to do with a Leica camera results in money being spent), I was happy to have it back. I was able to get some cool shots of the shop, which I thought would be a nice addition to this post (to make up for a distinct lack of good photos from the disposable camera!).
Hard at work on the Leica
Camera heaven
I have also done more research and found lots of new film that should last me the next 3 months or so, that is still only 12 weeks out of 52! But there is some interesting stuff here including infrared film and puple/chrome!
35mm film delight!
You can find a (very small) selection of the Fuji 1600 disposable camera photos below. At the end of the day, this is all an experiment so I'm not that annoyed at the results, but I cannot say I would recommend a disposable camera over a real one though.
OVERALL RESULT: FAIL (also known as not knowing how to read instructions properly!)
And as always - stop reading this and go take more photographs!
See you next time, Neil.
Quite nice during the day - colour balance is decent
Hard (impossible) to manage selective focus on an automated disposable camera
This photo is as empty as my camera was of any decent photographs
The world's most depressing ping-pong table
Not quite the image I was hoping for!
Bad performance at ISO 1600!
