Film Camera a Month - July

So July was meant to be featuring my pentax 6x7 but whilst out adventuring the shutter stopped (eep!) though I eventually (thanks google!) figured out it needed a new battery which I ordered online (takes time!).  In the meanwhile, I switched over to one of my toy cameras, the Sunny Juice Box - which along with the fuji film loaded inside (superia 200) pleasantly surprised me :) I ended up digging the tones and instead of complaining about how fuji film handles shadows I deliberately processed the photos on the softer side = a outcome fee was happy with :P

This plastic fantastic camera, literally has a shutter button, you can read more about it in my film camera guide but honestly, I 99% bought it because of its novelty factor :P I mean the shutter button is a fake plastic straw :p how awesome is that!

The mechanism to rewind the film is super flimsy, it stopped turning (but not freely!) so I was kind of stuck as to what to do, I took it in a darkish room and opened the back - oops! Film hadn't rewound completely, so I think that ended in a few light streaks, which I love but I probably wouldn't turn into a habit of doing. The trick to get the film to completely re-wind back into its canister was solved by pulling the little plastic release clip that sits under the film and turning it until the film canister started winding freely! lesson learned!

Second lesson learned, never take toy camera shots inside unless your film is a crazy high ISO or you have some crazy good lighting going on :p Still appreciate this shot of silhouette Peachy and the crazy light streak :)

You can check out the previous month's cameras over here

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Sunny Juice Box Camera - Lomography 100 Film

Okay this Lomography 100 film roll was recently put through my Sunny juice Camera so I have more of an idea of where things went wrong :)

STATS
12 keeps 23 fails
Fail Reasons
Shooting into the sun, the plastic lens doesn't handle that too attractively! Shooting indoors - what was I thinking! Fingers over the lens and trying to do close up shots

Things to remember : The fail reasons are pretty much no brainers, I obviously wasn't using my brain when taking them.  Maybe the problem with me and toy cameras - I'm so use to doing everything manually on my other cameras that when it comes to toy cameras and all I have to do is press a button I tend to just shut off- need to be a bit more diligent & always always have fun!

On a side note I see the light leak again, could it possibly be my cameras dodgey closure letting in light, eep I really hope so!

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Sunny juice Box Camera - Ektar 100 Film

Okay onto my second favourite toy camera my juice box! I love this camera, it has huge flaws in its design though, the shutter release button is actually the straw that you have to turn to release and then press down on - it's super flimsy and I never know if I'm going to break it or if I've turned it the right way :p  I can totally forgive that though because it looks like a juice box!!! Anyway else with me here?  It also produces really cool saturated pics seemingly regardless of film choice.

I also feel super stealthy whilst taking photos too like people are thinking I'm just having a sip on my popper :p

Now I have no idea about stats on this film roll as I wasn't as diligent back in the day with keeping track of performance and areas of improvements, I'm a bit OCD about it now just because I don't want to keep making the same mistakes :p. 

The top left photo is of me with the camera (thanks Ben) I actually still had dreadlocks then so you can tell it was a while ago! The top right photo is what I was taking photos of that day - Ben and the beach :) From memory that light streak is because I accidentally opened the back one day thinking there was no film in it, I love light streaks so I wish I could accidentally do that every time without totally wiping my film! The bottom right photo although awesome does have my big dirty finger smudge in the corner, another problem with this camera, because it's small the way I hold it causes my fingers to sit dangerously close to the shutter opening and because it doesn't have a protruding lens you often don't know you're doing it!

So I guess the things to remember are, don't break the straw, make sure your fingers are out of the way and like it says on it's box use on a sunny day! I think this last point will go for the majority of toy cameras, because you lack control over the exposure settings, in this case you can only control the film speed and thus you really need to shoot on sunny days to make sure your photos come out properly exposed! The sad thing about this camera is you can't do double exposures - once you press the shutter if won't let you press it again until you've advanced the film lever to the next frame...poop!

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