Like the US Government, the CIA has its own Flickr account, and one of the sets they have features photos of various gadgets used by the agency’s spies over the years. Among the gadgets are a number of spy cameras designed for various purposes and scenarios.
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Flickr user Chase Lewis created this working pinhole camera using ordinary LEGO pieces (we featured an uber-fancy LEGO Mindstorm camera before) for his high school film photography course.
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How do photographers get those wide images that bleed through the edges of the negative, showing the sprocket holes? It’s a technique that allows your to create stunning panoramic images — these little bits of film become art in themselves. These photographs are achieved by loading 35mm film into a 120 medium format camera. This tutorial was written with the Holga in mind, but the same technique works for other 120 cameras as well.
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Here’s a fun project for you film-lovers: use 35mm film in a Holga instead of medium format to shoot wide photos that bleed onto the sprocket holes of the film! This video tutorial shows how this is done. You can also check out this Instructables tutorial for a text-version of this project.
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For those of you who still shoot film and are adventurous, have you tried double film photography? Flickr user Chuck Miller stuck two 35mm Fuji 200 films — one normal, one redscale — into a Holga 120N and shot the films simultaneously to get these unique sprocket hole, layered photographs.
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Julie Lewis saves the 35mm film of Hollywood movies from destruction after they’re done running in theaters by upcycling them into unique handbags and wallets. The 100% polyester films are sometimes from a mix of different movies, or sometimes from the same popular film (e.g. “Twilight”).
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Photojojo is selling this nifty Juice Box Camera, a 35mm camera that looks like a box of apple juice. The shutter is triggered by — you guessed it — the straw!
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You’ve probably seen do-it-yourself pinhole cameras or even large format cameras created with foam core, but what about a solid metal do-it-yourself 35mm camera? That’s exactly what Denis Mo decided to create, posting his step-by-step documentation to French camera forum collection-appareils.fr.
Denis had wanted to do such a project for 25 years, but it wasn’t until he was almost 42 that he had the technical know-how to actually do it. Except for the shutter curtain fabric, ball bearings, and screws, all of the individual pieces that were used to create the camera were custom made.
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Earlier this month Kodak announced their new Portra 400 color negative film, replacing the Portra 400NC and 400VC professional films. This might seem like backwards thinking, since so many films have been discontinued as of late, but Kodak believes film is making a comeback. In an interview with the British Journal of Photography, Kodak’s US marketing manager Scott DiSabato states,
We won’t make a product like this if we don’t believe we’ll see a return on it. Luckily the colour negative film sales have been very stable over the past year. Black-and-white is also doing extremely well. It almost feel that there is a very real resurgence for film.
A lifeline for film seems to be college campuses, where many young people are introduced to 35mm film photography for the first time (like I was):
[...] the most exciting thing is to see the younger people adopt film. It’s almost a generational thing. They have not shot film growing up, but once they do get a hold of film in a university, they just seem to fall in love with it. And that’s exciting. It just seems to have a lot of influence.
You can read the entire interview here. What are your thoughts on the future of film photography?
(via Wired)
This is either marketing at its best or worst. Vivitar has a new site and infomercial for a plastic 35mm film camera for $10. Who would buy such a thing? Probably really, really old people who aren’t reading this blog.
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