5 Questions on Analogue Photography with…

In our ongoing series "5 Questions on Analogue Photography with…" we send out the same set of questions to photographers. This time Maren Michaelis - fashion designer, photographer and art director - answered these questions and prepared a very fascinating burlesque photo gallery for us.

Name: Maren Michaelis

Occupation: fashion designer/ photographer/ art director

Country: Germany

1. Tell us about yourself in three sentences maximum?

Always looking for interesting and odd things in life. Design and music are my life, the way I can express myself. There are no boundaries and life is shitty enough, thats why I need to be constantly on the move.

2. Why do you still shoot analogue?

Because digital is a whole lotta different thing. The quality will never be reachable and its got depth and high contrast, you can always see the difference. Often digital is flat and soulless.

3. What photographic equipment (cameras, films, and accessories) do you usually have in your bag?

Digital Canon camera and an analogue camera (mostly my beloved small Diana with flash and some dia film), zoom objective, prime lens, external flash, lots of accus and compact flash cards. The Diana is great to carry out at night, if the big camera and equipment are too heavy.

4. Share a trick of yours that will always result to a great photo.

Cross-processing dia film makes great bold colours!

5. What photographers influence your work?

It’s more like film stills (czech stop motion, 20ies era) and people who inspire me. Especially performers and it’s all spontaneous. The photographers I admire the most these days are Madame Peripetie, Miles Aldridge and Paolo Roversi.

Thanks to Maren for taking the time to answer our questions. Check out more of her work on her website marenmichaelis.com and have a look at the work of a talented analogue photographer and good friend of hers, Melike Oklap.

Lomography vs. Photography

Lomography is an adaptation of the word photography that was originally inspired by users of the Lomo LC-A.

The first Lomo was a simple fixed lens 35mm Russian produced camera that was discontinued in 2005 due to the waning popularity of film photography. Shooting with a Lomo was a challenging experience that embraced flaw-inducing techniques while demanding acceptance from its loyalists. Though the original Lomo is a rare sight, unexpected deals on cameras like this one keep growing and contributing to the popularity of Lomography throughout the digital age.

If Lomography had to be reduced to a single word, it would be “unpredictable.” Lomographers are encouraged to disregard their usual proclivity for image perfection is search of uniquely characterized snapshots influenced by uncontrolled photographic circumstances. To become an active Lomographer, one’s first step is to acquire a camera that can be kept in one’s pocket at all times. This is why early cameras on phones were so quickly embraced by many Lomographers. The low quality simplicity of the early camera phone images has since been replaced by applications like the Hipstimatic that convert modern high-quality camera phone images into distorted Lomography images. Carrying a camera encourages Lomographers to shoot constantly, which leads to an increase in snapshot capture.

A snapshot is a photograph that is taken for personal documentary reasons with little regard for the technical proficiency of the overall image. Before digital cameras became incredibly efficient and affordable, the only viable option for the general public interested in capturing snapshots was fixed lens 35mm cameras. Many of these generally appealing 35mm cameras simply had a single button that was pushed to capture an image and required no attention to focusing or exposure.

Today, the one-button digital photography that is widely popular may seem similar in execution to the earlier 35mm cameras, but the intelligent electronics within all digital cameras are actually making a tremendous amounts of adjustments and calculations. This is why the compact digitals of today can usually capture a decent image regardless of the scene, but the 35mm one-button cameras of before suffered extraordinary variance in their image results.

The varying results of 35mm film photography were due to improper exposure, improper focus, low quality lenses or combinations of these influences. The results, as in the Lomo LC-A, would yield surprising consequences once the photographs were developed and printed. Originally, many people were frustrated by the common flawed results inherent in the pictures from a cheap camera.

However, Lomography encouraged photographers to recognize each individual print as a unique work of random expression that unpredictably enhanced the nature of the original snapshot. Once photographers began to embrace this concept, Lomography’s popularity exploded.

Legendary Lomography cameras include the Lomo LC-A, the Holga, the Diana and the Action Sampler. Each of these cameras is made of cheap plastic and offers image characteristics that are now being replicated by DLSR users through Photoshop, but this misses the point of Lomography. This type of photography is not about having ultra-saturated images or extreme vignetting or finding the highest megapixel camera deals. It is about embracing the uncontrolled singularity of a cheap camera’s low quality imaging skills by respecting each printed picture as a work of randomly occurring art. Lomography encourages spending less time looking at life through a camera by creating memory-inspiring pictures, “shot from the hip,” with their own unique natural flaws.

Annie Birk is a jack of many trades, first and foremost she is a 5th grade school teacher. She also enjoys nature photography and gardening.

Lomography Experimental Lens Kit

Compatible with all Micro 4/3 Digital cameras, the Lomography Experimental Lens Kit gives you full creative freedom.

The Lens Kit includes 3 lenses; a fisheye lens for fantastic 160° shots, a wide-angle 12mm lens and standard 24mm lens.

With the lens kit as part of your experimental photographic arsenal, you’ll get photos with all kinds of random, crazy, colorful and exciting effects such as color saturation.

It is the first lens kit in the world which allows you to take real, optical multiple exposure snapshots using digital cameras. You can also maximize your creativity by adding color filter inserts.

The Experimental Lens Kit contains 3 different lenses to shoot with - The Standard 24mm lens, Wide-angle 12mm Lens and Fisheye Lens. With each lens you can take totally different experimental shots!

Are You The Best New Black & White Photographer?

“We don’t see the world in black and white so this is probably why we are so attracted to it,” says Luca Desienna of Gomma, the publishing company behind MONO, a collection of books featuring the best in B&W photography. Think your splendorous shots can make it to print?

Last year, a London-based imprint called Gomma set out to find the most exciting new talent working in black and white photography today. Eight artists and a volume later, the search continues for the next book of the best black and white photographs.

“Since the first days of Gomma we’ve been always publishing black and white photography—it is and always will be one of the most extraordinary art forms that enables us to document the world we live in… and also what is beyond it or underneath it,” says Gomma founder, Luca Desienna.

This year’s winners of the MONO open call for entries are Daisuke Yokota, Maki, Tricia Lawless Murray, Francesco Merlini, Jan von Holleben, Jukka-pekka Jalovaara, Sofia Lopez Mañan and Stephane C. Their work will be featured in the first edition of MONO to be released this fall.




“Black and white photography, which is often associated with analogue photography, has become rarer and rarer,” said Desienna about photography in the digital age. "Agfa collapsed, and films and chemicals started disappearing, so as it happens with anything that gets near to extinction, it just becomes more valuable.”

At the same time, Desienna says great new digital, black-and-white photography has added to the exquisite and timeless world that monochrome images create. “We don’t see the world in black and white so this is probably why we are so attracted to it,” he says. “In addition I believe that black-and-white photography has the capability to show the inner moods of the photographers better than colors do.”

If you think your work should be featured in MONO, you still have 232 days left to submit your black and white portfolio for the next volume coming to print. If you think you need more practice, why don’t you get yourself the shiny new La Sardina Splendour?


The savviest camera for street photography, the design is based on the original Sardina can cam, the Kandor Candid. Outshine other photographers with the La Sardina Splendour’s fine hammer metal finish and elegant lines, wide-angle capabilities, Fritz the Blitz flash, and more! Pop in a roll of our Lady Grey film and have a splendorous time exploring the possibilities of black and white photography.


For more info, visit MONO. Sourced from TIME.

Lomography’s Lady Grey is a lovely black and white 35mm ISO 400 film that will add class and elegance to your photos. For capturing action and great low-light shots, Lady Grey is your best bet. See our selection of Lomography films here.

written by denisesanjose

La Fonoteca Barcelona: Analogue Photographer in Action

Here is how I learned how concert photographs do not always require the best lenses or even the best zooms. This is the story of how I became the analogue concert photographer for La Fonoteca Barcelona.

Lafonoteca (which means the music library) is a website by and for music lovers, and Spanish music in particular. Its intention is to do an exercise in historical memory, to rescue musical legacy from oblivion, and promote the current scene, which they consider of great value. LaFonoteca BCN was created with the intention of closing the gap between the different music scenes at the state level.

Taking Madrid and Barcelona as representatives, it establishes a flow to discover emerging bands which in many cases find it difficult to break out of their city.

During the preparations for first concert scheduled for a Friday in October, the organizers of this great project asked if I would be willing to make small photo reports of the individual concerts, and as you know, when offered a project like this you can not say no.

The day chosen for the debut concert was October 21st. The headliners making their premiere were the Barcelona band Double Billet and Madrid’s Betacam. The two pop bands gathered at the Heliogàbal bar of Gracia to prove that pop music has no boundaries and is not entirely undiscovered. What was seen was this! You can listen to the group’s music (which we heard live) through each of their Bandcamp websites!

So, this demonstrated that concert photography need not be digital, with great lenses and even better zooms. Multiple opportunities still occur in alternative events such as my October 21st. You can check out upcoming events at the La Fonoteca Barcelona page.

How to Achieve Lomography Effects Through Photoshop

Lomography is an interesting form of photography that’s on the rise today. It’s kind of like ‘backwards photography’–it’s a plastic toy camera that makes use of film. Because everything is made of plastic (yes, including the lens), the lomo camera does everything it’s not supposed to do: saturated colors, high contrast, off hues, vignettes, blurs, and more. It has developed into an art form because of these unique, ‘bad’ features.

However, lomography is expensive and time-consuming. A toy camera can be as cheap as $25 and more than $100. Plus you can’t see your pictures until the whole roll is over, and then you have to have it processed and scanned afterwards. Not to mention how disappointing it is when you found out that nothing from your roll came out. Even as a big fan of lomography myself, I also find it a bit too overpriced for a piece of plastic.

So whether you’re a cheapskate, you’re too impatient, or you simply find lomography too hard, there is a faster way to get those yummy lomo photos; thanks to the technology otherwise known as Adobe Photoshop.

Vignettes

Vignettes are a common feature in lomo photographs. Vignettes are characterized by a loss of clarity in the sides/corners of the image. It is often darker and blurry in the sides, but sharp and bright at the middle.

Do you know that creating a vignette in Photoshop is extremely easy? It can be done in less than five steps. The first thing to do is to open the image you want to add a vignette to. Copy the image and paste it in a new layer. Thus you have the same images in both layers.

On the top layer, select the elliptical marquee tool. Select and drag, making sure to include the whole image apart from the sides and corners. After you’ve made your final selection, right-click inside the selection and click on ‘Select Inverse’. This will swap the selected area, thus selection is now on the outer areas.

Now adjust the Brightness of the outer edges by selecting Image – Adjustments – Levels. On Output Levels, drag the light arrow to the left to make it darker. Afterwards, go to Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur to create soft edges. I adjusted my Gaussian Blur to 35, but you can adjust settings to where you are satisfied.

Of course, we are not yet done. Be sure though that only the topmost layer has been edited, leave the bottom layer of the same image untouched. To smoothly blend the vignette to the image, select the erase tool, set the brush tool to a big brush at 0% Hardness.

The final output should look more or less like the image below. You can also adjust the Brightness/Contrast of the image so that it can simulate the image more.

Cross-processed Photos

Lomography photographers often cross process their film, giving their photos weird colors and saturation. Cross processing is an old darkroom technique, the process involves deliberately processing film with a chemical solution intended for another kind of film. This method was maybe discovered by photographers who accidentally used the wrong chemicals by mistake; and found the results interesting.

Here’s how you can do cross-processing through Photoshop. Let’s start with this image:

Pretty photo, but not retro funky enough.

Adjust the contrast level of the image until you are satisfied. Next is to open Image – Adjustment – Curves. Basically you just increase the Red and Green Channels in the Highlights, and drop the shadows. In the Blue Channel on the other hand, raise the Shadows and reduce Highlights.

You can experiment with the effects yourself to get the desired cross-process effect you have in mind–go crazy or be subtle, whatever you want.

Multiple Shots

Many lomo cameras feature multiple shots in one single image: the Action Sampler, the Super Sampler, the Oktomat, etc. These cameras are great toys, but one has to admit that the novelty tends to wear off quickly.

Super Sampler Shot

There’s no doubt it’s easy to create this effect with Photoshop. All you need is to take continuous shots of the same place and subject, juxtapose it together in the Action Sampler / Super Sampler / Oktomat layout and it will look just the same. You can even add the vignette, noise and contrasted effect to make it more lomo-ish.

Photo by Rachel Arandilla

Photo above is an Action Sampler effect I created through Photoshop, done in less than ten minutes.

Fisheye Effect

The Fisheye is a cool effect, which takes a 170 degree photo of your surroundings. SLR cameras also have fisheye lens to achieve this effect. If you don’t have a fisheye lens or a Fisheye camera, here’s a quick way to get it in your photos.

Choose the image you want to create the fisheye effect. Crop it into a square by holding down ‘Ctrl’ while dragging to the desired area.

Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool and hold down ‘Ctrl’. Hold down until you select the whole image. Right click and select inverse, and fill the inverse area with black or white.

To create the fisheye effect, Simply open Filters – Distort – Spherize. Choose 100% and click OK.

Fisheye Effect

How About a Lomo Action Set

If you’re too lazy to do the editing yourself, there are downloadable action sets where you can simply click on ‘Play’. The computer does the rest for you, lomo-izing your photos in one second.

There are plenty of action sets online, such as the Lomo PS Actions by photoshop-stock. It’s free to use and download, with 6 available lomo actions that you can try. Here is the original image I selected:

Original photo, untouched

And here are the 6 lomo actions I tried, with their different colors and effects:

Lomo Mobile Application?

Lomo shots are now really popular, and because of this, mobile application developers are now taking a piece of the pie. Applications are now available to simulate lomo effects of your digital photos for both the Android and iPhone.

One of the more popular lomo applications is Instagram, which gives lomo filters to your otherwise dull iPhone shots. Moreover, you can instantly share your images on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and more.

The rise of these popular iPhone applications gave rise to a new term: iPhoneography. Essentially, this means the art of taking photos with your iPhone. You can post-edit the photos or not, if you are one of those purist photographers.

Is Photoshop the Answer?

Thing is, it’s not the effects that make lomography so great: it’s the experience. It’s about not knowing what you get, it’s about the surprise and the suspense, being thrilled and sometimes being disappointed. It’s about clicking the shutter with the picture in your mind and finding out it looks very different in print. Finally, lomography is about practice and experimentation, knowing more about your camera and yourself.

Lomography Cameras – Retro Revisted

Most modern cameras do everything as perfectly as possible. They automate focus, aperture, shutter, film speed, white balance and everything else you would care to think of. They recognise faces and switch to portrait mode – even taking the picture when your subject smiles.

Lomo cameras don’t. They leak light, over and under saturate your images, over-expose your images and sometimes stop taking pictures altogether. Why would you want such a device? Well I asked myself the same question when I bought my first Holga.

Most of you, I’m sure, will have heard of Lomography. It has been around since the early 90s and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger; it now has more of an established following rather than cult status, but this is why I recommend you spend some time shooting with a lomo as these cameras often provide very satisfying results with the minimum of input.

Pictured above is a Holga, that most commonly comes as the Holga starter kit in which you get the camera with flash, 120 medium format film, colour gels, tape and a book with some pictures taken by enthusiasts to inspire you. This of course wasn’t the first camera that the company produced. It was actually a Russian camera, the Lomo Kompakt Automat that inspired two students to produce the first lomo after they found a Russian company in St. Petersburg that produced the LC-A compact. The word spread quickly and Lomography soon enjoyed a cult following. The two students later produced a set of 10 golden rules, namely:

1. Take your camera everywhere you go.

2. Use it any time – day and night.

3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it.

4. Try the shot from the hip.

5. Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible.

6. Don’t think. (William Firebrace)

7. Be fast.

8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film.

9. Afterwards either.

10. Don’t worry about any rules.

These rules are all in the spirit of shooting with lomos and if you want to read the full set you can go to the official Lomography site to read them here.

So what has changed over the last 15 years? Well the official website now stocks over a hundred models / kits and integrates a community where you can upload your own photos. There are also lots of spinoff websites and communities and modifications of cameras such as Holga Mods.

I thought that it would be worth catching up with Lomography on Cool Photo – because it does give you an opportunity to have fun and make mistakes when shooting film and this lets you display your photos in a very creative way. With a camera like the Holga that uses medium format film, you can enlarge your images and hang them in a no nonsense way or have fun with an actionsampler (below) and record your results in a photo book or DIY photo display.

The most inexpensive lomo cameras make great photo gifts because they are easy to use and need very little instruction, it really is just ‘point and shoot’ which breaks down the barriers that more modern digital cameras often impose on you, simply because they are built to take the perfect picture.

From my personal experience I would say the one drawback with Lomos is that they do break fairly easily, or rather they sometimes fail and you don’t quite know why. Its often just a spring that has had the attention of too many trigger happy photographers or the weight of a laptop popping open the casing. Medium format film can also be expensive to develop and a pain to find a lab that still processes it without hassle.

Having said that the whole point of these cameras is to be a bit wacky with your style, try and shoot from the hip and when you get your photos printed, to display, upload and share the results with your friends. Its always more intriguing getting results from film you’ve shot on a lomo than uploading your compact flash card to your laptop – often you’ve already seen those results on the LCD on the back of your DSLR.

I have heard of a mini digital camera with a lomo effect called the Minimo. I would certainly be interested to try one of these out – although I know some would argue that replicating the effects that lomos create is a bit of a move away from the cultish and romantic lomo community but we’re open to ideas here at cool photo.

If you’re new to Lomography then you can check out the official website here and if you have taken pictures with any lomo cameras yourself, I would love to hear from you and maybe post some of your creations up on Cool Photo Ideas!

A Beginner's Guide to Star Trail Photography

Let's call this an overview to the basics of star trail photography for beginners from the pros. These are a short collection of techniques I've read and learned from books and tutorials that I want to share with you.

I never thought I’d be writing a tipster on anything as I am, for the most part, a “Don’t think. Just shoot.” Lomographer – not as a rule I follow by, mind you; it’s more of a laziness to think kind of thing. As a result, I tend to either not pay attention to the details and/or forget what I did during my shoots. You see how this would pose as a problem if one wanted to write a tipster? Still, I thought to give it a shot.

A few months ago, during California’s hottest months, a couple of friends and I were roughing it in the southern Mojave wilderness for a night and a day…

Oh alright, so “wilderness” and “roughing it” aren’t exactly the accurate words to describe a campground with picnic tables, firepits, and grills. In my defense, we had no running water, the cell phone reception was nonexistent, the bugs were so massive you can practically see their faces grinning evilly at you from a foot away, and coyotes were howling in the dead of the night. For a girl who’s lived in big cities most of her life, that’s about as wild as it could get.

Wait, where was I? Oh yes…

Besides a much needed time off from the hustle and bustle of LA, we wanted to practice our light-painting techniques. That led us to camp out in the desert. I, however, was excited to try my luck at star trail photography (which I’ve never done before… ever) as I’ve always had this great love and fascination for the night sky. So before we left the city, I did some research on tried and tested techniques employed by veteran star trail photographers. This way, I could come home with at least a photograph or two with streaks of light on them (and by lights, I don’t mean from passing airplanes).

A month or two later, when I finally got the chance to scan my roll from camping, I found that I actually got more than a couple of good shots – considering it was my very first attempt.

And so here I am, writing this tipster, to share those techniques from the pros with you. Now bear in mind that they’re only basic pointers to get you started – no fancy footwork, no technical discussions of any sort.

Location, location, location!!! Now you don’t have to go all Bear Grylls on this one and hike all the way to the middle of the Sahara. A nice, mostly flat area a few miles away from your town or city will do as long as…

◦it’s dark enough.

◦it’s far enough that the sky won’t reflect the city lights.

◦there are a few nice landmarks (trees, rock formations, etc…) you can illuminate and use as foregrounds.

◦it’s safe enough that you can stay there all night without getting hunted by big cats, bears, canines, psychos… (you get the gist).

◦it’s on a clear, cloudless night.

Rule of Thumb. I read somewhere that the light from a star moves every 15 seconds. I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate but let’s assume it is. This means that…

◦in 5-10 minutes, you will get visible (albeit short) light trails in your exposure.

◦the longer you leave the shutter open, the longer the trails will be.

Find Polaris The North Star is the only constant, unmoving star in the northern hemisphere (it’s the Sigma Octantis / South Star for you southerners). Meaning…

◦if you point your lens towards it and you expose long enough, you will get star trails that form circles around it, and

◦if you point away from it, you’ll get striped patterns instead.

Equipment

◦Most pros prefer normal to wide-angle lenses. I read somewhere, though, that it’s good to use a wide-angle when you’re pointing due East or West and to use a telephoto lens when pointing at the pole.

◦Films with 50-100 ISO – longer exposures but less noise

◦A firm, steady tripod because… oh you know why…

◦A camera with a bulb setting (or should I say, cameras. I used my Canon Xs and my Dianas.)

◦A cable release with a lock mechanism as your exposures would take from minutes to hours.

◦Blanket/s for warmth, flashlights, a good book or a friend to talk to (preferably somebody you can outrun, just in case…), maybe a timer if you plan on taking in-between naps or lots of coffee is you don’t, food… you get the general idea.

Aperture Setting. I’ve learned that the pros prefer to shoot at the widest aperture setting which makes sense really as that would let more light in. Careful to position yourself at least 10 meters away from illuminated foregrounds though, so focus won’t be an issue. I learned that the hard way.

Experiment with exposure times. It really depends on what you’re trying to achieve in your photograph.

Be patient and have fun!!

That’s pretty much the key points a beginner star trail photographer would need – unless I’m missing some things which I’m pretty sure some awesome people would point out and share with us. For more advanced techniques, the web is an intricate source of information, all of which are ready at a moment’s notice.

So good luck and happy trailing!

30+ Beautiful and Colorful Examples of Lomo Photography

You've got to love an artistic movement that's all about happy accidents. In fact, what some consider mistakes, like over-saturated colors and exposure defects are what makes lomography so special. 

Born in the early '90s by a group of Viennese students who discovered the Lomo Kompakt Automat camera while on vacation in Prague, lomography has grown into an international movement that uses photography as a creative and cool way to capture the world.

Vivid, surreal, unique, and retro are just some words to describe lomography. Deemphasizing formal technique with the motto "don't think, just shoot" leads to spontaneous moments captured in a rainbow of colors and a wide range of style.

Photo sources: United Photo Press, Lomogaphy, Wallcoo, Liad Cohen Photography. H e i d i . L, Hejl, Cormac Phelan, blue_st, shoegazer,bomobob and Mathieu Struck.

7 Days living with ... film photography

Can you survive a week without digital?

Almost everyone on Team Pocket-lint is a camera nut of some description but out of all of us with our various bits of high tech snapping kit, I've also got quite a strong collection of Lomo cameras. 

The question is though, is film still relevant beyond retro style photography? Does it still have a place in society and how much of a pain in the bum is to use now that we're mollycoddled by the happy snapping ways of digital? I decided to find out in 7 days.

The challenge here was to go for an entire week without using any digital cameras whatsoever, including the one on my iPhone. My day-to-day camera, which was housed safely on my bookcase for the entire 7 days, is a Panasonic DMC-LX3 - the brand's top-of-the-range compact from a couple of years ago which is nice and portable while also offering excellent picture quality, largely thanks to its fancy Leica lens. I also use a lot of film cameras, but they're all lo-fi models (mostly Lomo) so the first step was to track down a decent film snapper to use for all the Pocket-lint reviews and hands-on work that I do. As it turns out, not an easy task. 

After a lot of back and fourth with various brands, Nikon agreed to lend me an alarmingly expensive F6 SLR (around £1,500) for the duration, along with a rather large AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm zoom lens worth something like the same again. I was also sent a Kodak Ultra Compact single-use camera, along with some film, while Polaroid loaned me one of its Polaroid 300 instant cameras. The film-based lineup was completed by my Lomography La Sardina.

Obviously, this isn't a review of any of the cameras involved - it's an account of life without a digital camera. My 7 days begins on Thursday - simply because the Nikon camera turned up at my door halfway through the week. Read on to find out what happened.

Thursday

Thanks to a week of very late nights staying up to follow the London riots on Sky News and Twitter (and praying that they wouldn't come any closer to my home or those of my friends), the tail-end of the week was something of a struggle. On the agenda for Thursday was a review of the Philips Fidelio DS7700 iPad dock. Usually I would breeze through my review shots on my digital camera, checking them on the screen as I go, before transferring them to my computer and resizing them - all within about half an hour of setting up the kit. Not this time. 

Naturally, all of the pictures needed to be snapped using the Nikon F6 and things took a bit longer when film was brought into the equation. After finally managing to load up a Kodak Gold ISO 200 colour film after several failed attempts and a substantial amount of swearing, I was finally ready to get stuck in. The F6 is a heavy camera at the best of times and even more so when you're trying to balance an iPad dock in one hand and use the camera one-handed.

I'm not really a SLR aficionado, so I was at the mercy of the hastily Googled manual when it came to setting the camera's controls. The fact that I couldn't take a couple of test shots and look at them to check that the settings were correct before I got started was a major hassle. Having to finish the film off was also something of a pain. Using a well-practiced review routine, I can usually get the 10-15 shots that I need by taking around 20-25 of them on my digital camera. As this iPad dock was a relatively simple piece of kit with only a couple of buttons, there were only a certain amount of shots that I needed, but I had to keep going after that to finish off the film - taking up precious time and also making by arm ache from holding the F6.

Once finished, instead of just popping an SD card into my computer, I had to make the 10-minute saunter down to the local Boots to put my film in for one-hour processing, at a cost of £7.49 (I initially went into the nearby Snappy Snaps, who said that they'd be able to take care of my photos in an hour, but then backtracked when I presented them with a film and said that it would take three). Then I went back home for lunch before returning to pickup my disc of images, all the time praying that they were ok so that I wouldn't have to repeat the entire process.

Thankfully, the pictures were mostly usable, although the review lacks a close-up shot of the Bluetooth and volume controls as none of my shots of these were sharp enough and I didn't think that it was worth the cost of another film and more processing to put right this tiny detail (not to mention the time involved).

After work, I moseyed on down to the Lomography store in Soho for a largely beer-based "tea party" to celebrate the new B&W Earl Grey & Lady Grey films. Being without a digital camera in the Lomo store is hardly unusual so I didn't miss not being able to use one, and I took along the La Sardina and a Polaroid 300. I took a few shots, including this Poloroid snap (above) of myself, and fellow journos and Lomo users Kat and Laura.

Friday

The last day of the working week involved a morning of catching up on emails and wrangling couriers and review kit, including an argument with an pointedly pedantic courier about which London borough my home is located in (it seemed somewhat irrelevant, as he'd already managed to find his way to my doorstep). After such high-jinks I was happy to shoot off to Soho for lunch with accessory brand Proporta to check out the latest products at which I'd be expected to fire of some shots and then get them up onto the Pocket-lint pages as quickly as possible.

The key here was planning. Not only did I have to find a bag sturdy enough to take my laptop, the heavyweight camera and the terrifyingly expensive lens, along with all the other nonsense that a lady carries around on a daily basis, I also had to make sure that there was a film processing shop within walking distance of the event at the restaurant.

After a fantastic Mexican lunch, we went through a presentation of the products before getting our hands on the goods. Usually I would take some snaps of the kit at the table as we went along. However, the lighting wasn't great, and as I knew I wouldn't be able to simply take a test shot and check it on screen, I waited until the presentation was over before scooping up the products and taking them to a brighter table near the window in order to take my photos, while getting quite a few odd looks from fellow patrons.

After bidding farewell to the Proporta team I bowled down to the nearest Snappy Snaps, which I'd located on the map earlier (handily on the same road as the restaurant), to drop my film in before hunting down the nearest place with Wi-Fi, which just so happened to be a pub (I love it when a plan comes together).

Fast forward one hour and I left a couple of journo friends in the boozer, guarding my computer and camera equipment while I legged it back to the nearby shop to pick up my disc (costing a rather steep £10.99). After checking the results, I was a little concerned that the pictures looked a tad soft and that they wouldn't be good enough to use. After checking with our learned news editor, who said they'd be fine with a couple of crops here and there, I posted the story - a good couple of hours after we'd first seen the products. With a digital camera, I would've been able to do this in less than half the time.

Saturday

After a much-needed lie-in and catching up on David Starkey's now infamous appearance on Newsnight via the medium of iPlayer, I picked up the papers to find someone I know on the front page of The Guardian with an in-depth feature in the travel section. In normal circumstances, I would've taken a snap of the article on my phone and "twitpicced" it to the person involved. Instead I had to settle for a Polaroid snap which, I reasoned, I could scan and send by email. As you can see from the picture below, it didn't really come out very well. Although the Polaroid 300 is fun to use, both the flash and viewfinder are very unpredictable, so it's not easy to get good results. In the end, I settled for a tweet, without a picture.

The afternoon was spent at my uncle's house largely drinking tea, catching up on family gossip and watching a couple of young family members (and a couple of not-so-young ones) playing Star Wars Lego on a PS2, followed by Despicable Me on Blu-ray. I didn't take any pictures of the younglings, because my Facebook-phobic cousin is not a fan of putting family snaps up on the web.

Travelling back to my cousin's house in a two-car convoy, there was something of a logistical error that left myself and a cousin waiting on the doorstep of his sister's house with nothing but a crate of beer and a throwaway camera for entertainment. Predictably, we cracked open a couple of cans and took some pictures in order to kill time until the the others turned up with the keys or we got arrested for loitering with intent in their front garden. Thankfully, it was the former.

After an evening of beer and wine, we settled down for dinner before my cousin attempted to "Fool Us" with a trick from the kids' magic set, leading to a lengthy discussion about Dynamo and Penn & Teller, and whether any of them use camera trickery (I've seen both acts live and can confirm that no camera-based tomfoolery was involved). Next up was a couple of unruly rounds of DVD-based boardgame Scene It. This is the kind of time when I might take a few snaps using my iPhone, or even make like an insufferable hipster and fire up the Hipstamatic iPhone app for some retro shots.

This week, of course, that wasn't going to be possible, so I took some shots with the throwaway Kodak camera. Drinking ensued. Most of the photos turned out ok, but I'm bound by the universal, unwritten rule of not publishing unflattering pictures of family and friends. If the photos had been digital, I would've checked them as we went along until we got a nice one. It's times like this that you really miss having a digital display and the ability to ditch bad pictures as you go.

Sunday

After making my way back from my cousin's house in the wilds of Kent, I stopped off to buy some food before returning to my South London lair. I didn't make it to bed until circa 3.45am that morning, so Sunday was never going to be anything other than decidedly low key and with a much-needed day to myself. I wasn't planning on doing much. Let alone take any photos. I watched Magnum Force. I drank some fizzy pop. I updated my Facebook status.

Monday

I was on features duty on Monday, with no work events to go to, meaning that I was chained to my desk for the majority of the day (not literally, you understand). With an evening of freelance graft planned, there weren't really any opportunities for photos later on in the day either. To be fair, I probably wouldn't have reason for taking any photos on such a Monday even if I were allowed to use a digital snapper. Riveting stuff.

Tuesday

Most of Tuesday was spent knocking a feature on iPad apps for musicians into shape, so again, not much chance for taking photos for work. During my lunch break, though, I went for a rummage round the local shops and happened upon a book that I've been trying to track down for ages. It's an old edition of Agatha Christie's Halloween Party that I borrowed from the library when I was younger which had, until last week, proved elusive.

Ideally, I would've taken a snap with my mobile phone and sent it to my mum to say "look - I found it!" and to advise her to scale down the search (lucky old mum). Obvisouly, I wasn't allowed to do that, so I took a Polaroid, scanned it and emailed it - quite a palaver considering that it wasn't exactly ground-breaking news that I was conveying. As with the previous Polaroid snap, the picture didn't come out too well either, but it just about did the trick.

Part of the afternoon was spent lining up an App of the Day for the following day, and I stupidly opted for a camera-based app that enables you to make your own Andy Wahol-style digital screenprint. I got as far as prepping the images, writing the intro and downloading the app before it occured to me that I wasn't actually allowed to test it due to the 7 Days rules. Instead, I simply tested the non-photo parts of the app which included images and videos about the artist and his techniques, while roping in a trusted friend and fellow journo to give the camera aspect of the app the once-over. Not ideal, but needs must when you're living by the rules of a 7 Days feature.

Wednesday

Wednesday was another desk-based day (unfortunately, it was rather a quiet week for press events) - I spent a fair amount of time writing up the first half of this feature, and researching another piece about how the iPad is changing the face of music. Once again, not many opportunities for photos. However, at lunchtime, I partook in a spot of baking, finishing off some guitar plectrum-shaped peanut butter biscuits that I'd started the previous evening (yes, really). On completing them, I would usually take lots of Hipstamatic photos, along with some conventional digital snaps on my LX-3 for a post on my baking blog. Instead, I took the photos using the Kodak throwaway camera and my Lomo La Sardina. Obviously it would have been preferable to use the Nikon F6 for this, but seeing as this involved the cost of an extra film and another round of processing, I decided to stick to finishing off the films that I'd already started.

I didn't have a chance to get the photos developed until the following Monday after I'd finished my 7 Days. I trudged down to Boots again on Monday morning only to be met by mild panic when the assistant said that she didn't know if they'd be able to process them as she wasn't sure if there was anyone in the lab. Thankfully, it turned out that there was someone who could deal with my snaps but apparently if I had taken them in over the weekend then there wouldn't have been. Phew.

I hadn't actually had the chance to completely finish the film in the throwaway camera, but as I was up against a deadline, I took it in for processing anyway, taking some shots along the way (including the snap of me looking like a maniac, taken in the building's mirrored lift) before sacrificing the last few untaken frames on the roll.

After tapping away on my laptop in the local Starbucks for an hour, while supping a frappuccino like some sort of new media ponce, I traced my steps back to Boots to pick up my discs (£14.98 for the pair) before walking home to check them out - a total of about an hour and a half, door to door. Although lots of my snaps came out well (sadly, the majority of these were taken before the 7 Days challenge started), my baking pictures were pretty poor, as you can see from the image below. 

While the throwaway camera and lomo snapper are great at certain things - close-ups are not their strong point. I'd forgotten just how easy it is to take decent-looking close-up shots with the macro mode on my digital camera. Thankfully, being something of a pessimist, not to mention a fan of planning ahead, I had the foresight to take my usual digital snaps of my baked goods the following day, after the 7 Days challenge was up. Sneaky.

Conclusions

As someone who uses a lot of film photography already, I didn't think that 7 Days doing without any digital snappers would be too difficult. How wrong I was. 

Taking photos at press events and for kit reviews is a relatively speedy process when using a digital camera (and one that's free, after the initial outlay for the camera and memory card), while using film not only includes the cost of the film itself, along with processing, it also takes up valuable time, not to mention the hassle of having to finish off any spare photos at the end - something you don't need to worry about when your images are stored on a memory card. The fact that I couldn't review my images as I went along was a also a major hurdle - not only was it somewhat stressful, but in a couple of cases, my pictures proved to be unusable. 

I also found that photo shops aren't always that reliable, with one telling me that it would take three hours to develop my film (despite initally saying yes to one hour), and another being unclear as to whether there was even anybody in the lab to do the job. I haven't had to use any high street photo processing services for some years, and it certainly seems that, as demand has decreased, so too has their reliability for a fast turnaround. Taking my films into the Lomo store in central London (as I do on a regular basis), is much more of a slick process. I know a lot of the staff in the shop, so there's also a social aspect to it with all of the in-store Lomographers also happy to help with camera or film advice.

I also missed having the use of the camera on my iPhone, especially the Hipstamatic app which I use for the majority of the pictures on my baking blog. Being able to take a quick snap of something interesting or amusing and send it to someone or upload it straight to Facebook was also something that I missed, and although Polaroid instant snaps are great at times, they're no substitute for a 3G-connected smartphone camera and it's interesting to see how tied up with the idea of social networking that the arrival of digital photography has been.

If you're really going to shoot film as your main modus operandi, then the key is planning. Not only did I have to make sure that I had enough film on me, I also had to ensure that there was a camera shop offering a one-hour service within walking distance. Although the products that I shot with the film camera were obviously important to us and our readers, I would've been reluctant to risk using a film camera if we'd been dealing with a more high-profile launch such as a new iPhone. No one would've been very impressed with us if we published a hands-on news story on Apple's latest gadget hours after everyone else, especially if the photos were a bit ropey.

It was really just quite astounding not how much the world has moved on but how it doesn't seem that interested in what it's leaving behind. The infrastructure for film photography just isn't there any more, at least not in an easily accessible way. The fact that even the main manufactures only seem to sell one model of film camera, if any at all, really says it all.

Film photography is great fun and offers a certain degree of unpredictability and creativity that you don't necessarily get with digital cameras and, if there was a positive to take away from all this, then, yes, there is a pleasure in shooting film that we've lost in our instant result digital times. However, when it comes to working on a fast-paced news-based tech site, anything other than digital simply won't do, and if you really want that surprise of film back in your life, then you can always turn your off preview screen.

Libby Plummer

United Photo Press