*Click Click*

For my Birthday last November, I was given an Olympus Om10. Now I’m no photographer but I’ve always been in love with the idea of using film. I’ve completely romanticized the idea of using an analogue camera. The idea of walking through fields of long grass and flowers, taking pictures of friends or a loved one whilst the sun casts everything in the kind of golden glow that you only get on a warm summer’s evening, is utterly appealing to me. Completely unrealistic too. Rather like my expectations for myself as a ‘photographer’.

Now being the type of person who hates reading instruction manuals and who’d much rather just try to use something or put something together straight off the bat, I, of course, loaded the camera up and went out shooting. I took pictures of vintage fairs, the snow, farmers markets and family members through the space of a few months. Don’t ask me why it’s taken me around six months to fill a film because I honestly don’t not myself.

A few years ago I was bought a Lomography Diana camera, also for my birthday. I remember looking at the website for months prier and being convinced that I was going to become some creative genius by simply using one of these incredibly quirky camera’s. I really couldn’t have been more wrong. It took three rolls of film, my money refunded twice, having a pity discount and asking for someone’s help before I could actually capture something that was a mass of blurred colour. After all of that I now have some really fun pictures of my friends and some weird bits and bobs, that I’ve grown to really love and that have become really precious.

I still wasn’t getting the type of images that I wanted from my Diana and being a mad work man who nearly always blames her tools, I decided it was time to invest in a proper analogue camera in the hope that it would fix all the problems that I had been experiencing with my Diana. Yet again I was wrong.

Like always I went to get my photo’s developed optimistically believing that at least two out of the twenty-eight photos would be good and makeup for the rest of them being awful. After an hour of waiting after month and months I finally got to see the fruits of my labors. Which weren’t great.

Although the pictures weren’t as bad as the first few sets of Diana photo’s I had developed they weren’t brilliant either. Only seventeen were developed – still better than the measly five-blurred Diana photo’s. It was at that point I thought ‘Maybe I should read a book about how to take photo’s’. In the end my friend sent me a link to a digital copy of the original manual, which I never thought about trying to find and I also thought that it was a really sweet thing to do. Over the next few days I plan to read the manual in the hopes that it teaches me how to use my camera to gain a good shot and not just a blurry mess from where I was trying to be ‘artistic’.

Some of the Photos I took are bellow :)