Hawaii Diana // Volcano Park
More odd pictures. This time from the volcano park. Thus ends my posts about Hawaii.
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Hawaii Diana // Manta Boat Sunset
The first photos are from the dock and boat ride on the way to swim with the manta ray. The last three were from the luau we went to early in the trip.
Hawaii Diana // The Beach
These were taken at the first beach we went to. The guy at the hotel said that this beach was where he ultimately decided to move to Hawaii. It was probably the nicest beach I've ever seen, but not nice enough to make me want to work in the service industry for the rest of my life.
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...
Little Monsters - Long Version
Location: Kids' Class, Shenyang
Camera: Diana F+ w/ Fisheye Lens
Little Monsters
The main element of my kids class is fairy tales. Cynthia, the Chinese teacher that I work with, picked out a ton of well-known stories for the kids to read, learn, and recite. I've had to spend a lot of time reading and re-editing these stories, though, in order to remove useless, antiquated language and replace it with words the kids might actually need to use at some point. One thing that Cynthia was really keen on is having the students perform one of the fairy tales.
This Monday, the kids will perform Cinderella. I think the parents will come, but I'm really not sure about that. Each student has a part; Amy, the best student of the group, is the narrator with something like two pages of dialog to memorize; basically every other student has two or three lines. They're all small actors. Seriously, like 3 feet tall. On Thursday, we let them create masks to wear during their performance, I'm sure they needed a break from all that incredibly interesting and enlightening Cinderella/Goldilocks/Princess v. Pea talk we'd been having over the past few days. With the masks on, they all look like Michael Jackson's kids while I looked like an out of work, gay super hero. You might notice that some of the pictures overlap. That was intentional. I used the Diana and only wound the film 2/3 of the way I should have. The idea was to create one long, connected set of images. You can view the long version at China in 12 Frames.
Nanhu Park
Location: Nanhu Park, Shenyang
Camera: Diana F+
Nanhu Park
Location: Nanhu Park, Shenyang
Camera: Diana F+
