new camera

i first got interested in neil gaiman when i was in high school, solely because tori amos is friends with him & has a few lyrics that refer to him. i read a bunch of sandman comics and eventually moved on to his novels. i don't have anything particularly eloquent to say about them; it's probably enough to note that the spine of my copy of American Gods is creased from repeat readings. now through the power of TWITTER (which i seem to blog about more than anything else, hmm) i feel like neil and i are bff. he's such a charming englishman. he posted about taking photos with an analog camera called the LC-A+. i was very enamormed of the pictures; they look, for lack of a better description, like the polaroids my mom took in the 1970s and stuck into albums that look a little something like this:


the basic story is: a company called LOMO was started in 1914 in Russia. they manufactured lenses & cameras among other things, were eventually nationalized (as i guess most things in Russia were) and in the early 90s some Austrian guys discovered the LC-A. they signed an agreement with the Russians and now they distribute the cameras. they soon produced their own line of analog cameras and now it seems like they are all (shocking!) manufactured in China.

after seeing neil gaiman's photos and reading about the cameras, i hinted to tate about 10 zillion times that i wanted one: specifically, a Diana F+. he got me one for christmas! it was glorious. it is so classy and movie star like:


i just got the first roll of photos back. i took them on a setting where, when you scan the negatives correctly, you can see the sprocket holes on the top & bottom of the photo -- the image takes up the entire height of the film instead of just the middle part we are used to. unfortunately the photo lab i went to is fascist and scanned the negatives normally so alas the artsier version of these pictures will have to come later. but some of them came out pretty cool anyway.



the whole roll is on my flickr.