Film Camera a Month - April - Instax mini 8

This month's (well technically last months - bit late!) film camera was my Instax mini 8 which I was pretty excited to use!

This photo above was before the camera had it sticker makeover which you can see in this post here!
By the way, the stickers seem to be holding up fine (for now!) :)

I already had a pack of the airmail film at home to use and a couple of months beforehand I had ordered a bunch more film off eBay knowing I'd be using my Instax in April. Spoiler alert that film never arrived and apparently you need to lodge a claim within 30 days of the postage arrival date for eBay to do anything about it - oops! Oh well, I do still have some photos to share so that's the good news :)

Family photo, although apologies goes out to Gremlin for chopping him off! Before taking this Ben asked if it was okay to take the photo horizontally - yes! I've actually been meaning to do that but I seem to always default to portrait shots - I think in part due to the way the camera is shaped to hold.

Adventures with my little bro and our friend Daz, ontop of a mountain, folding a paper plane to launch off the top.

Me on my birthday! And Ben with Gremlin to make up for Gremlin being chopped off in the first pic -lol His yawn + teeth cracks me up!

The camera is pretty simple, it runs off 2xAA batteries and it always fires a flash at 1/60th of a second. When you press the button in (the one closet to the lens) the lens pops out and it takes a few seconds to read the exposure and light up a suggested setting. You can see the orange light above has lit up the indoor symbol. Indoor has a f stop of 12.7, cloudy f/16, fine f/22 and clear f/32. So all that really means is the higher the number the less light the lens lets in. Which makes sense for the clear setting (pic of bright sun) that you would want the least amount of light when shooting on a sunny day so your photo isn't overexposed. There is also a hi-key setting which is meant to be the brightest of them all but I've been too scared to test that setting out! All the above info from the fuji website here which is worth checking out for some super simple/easy how-to photos.

I thought I might learn a lot this month, imparting the wisdom gained on here but I'm not sure I'm any better with my instax than I was a month ago :p Case in point, two fails below

The black photo was taken in Ben's bedroom with the window light shining on us but not an out-of-the-ordinary lighting situation, so I was very confused when it came back completely black (maybe Ben had his hand over the flash?!?). I took a couple of instax photos on top of the mountain we climbed (back-lit situation) and those photos got completed washed out and thus binned - note to self, wait to see if a photo works before taking multiple more :p  The photo of gremlin above is also washed out and probably too close, the minimum shooting range of the instax mini 8 is 0.6m. 

I have a sneaky suspicion that the maximum fstop (32) coupled with auto flash means it can't handle super sunny days or bright backlit situations outdoors?!? Anyone have any thoughts or experience?!? Maybe you could sneakily cover the flash :P

On the plus side and almost in contradiction I think it handles mix light on a subject well, that shot I took of me and then the one of Daz were both shots in pretty horrid mixed light but I think they came out pretty well and probably due to the flash always firing :)

Now before I go I wanted to show you some Instax accessories! There is a great blog, Citizen Erased run by Kathryn and although she seems to have stopped blogging for now, her site was always a constant inspiration for myself with this post in particular helping with my purchases below!

A cute case to carry my mini in :)  I bought it just as the plain pink and then figured some extra stickers wouldn't hurt :P

I also bought these stickers which you can add to your photos

I found adding the stickers to the album sleeve, instead of the photo itself meant if I got sick of the stickers I could simply remove without any damage to the photo :)

my album!

I also bought a close up lens, which pops onto the front (took me ages to work out how to pop it on!). I think the middle photo in the album shot above was taken with the close up lens.  

A nice feature of the close up lens is this little selfie mirror to the side! One downside I forgot to mention with the instax is the viewfinder doesn't actually relate to the lens, meaning you're simply looking through a hole that is above and to the left of the lens so you do need to take this into consideration when shooting things!

My plan now is to hunt down some more film because I think the Instax is a nice camera to just have for its instant ability. I really missed having a reliable film camera this month, so although my plan was to use Superheadz toy camera for May (and I did already take some shots with it) I've also busted out my canon 1000f to get me back into believing that film can replace digital!