The colour and texture of film with the Mini Diana F+
I’ve been running plenty of rolls of film through my Mini Diana F+ over the past few months. I’ve been quite experimental with black and white and colour film, and some colour rolls I have cross processed. Some shots I’ve structured the composition, but many have been just quick snaps without thinking about it too much. This spontaneity is what the principles of lomography are all about, which I like because they are more about a creative philosphty rather than technical stuff. Shooting spontaneously puts a smile on my face, but has drawn me to notice some of what I call ‘happy accidents’. This is where you capture something great unintentionally. When scanning my film after developing, I discover what I have actually got on the film. Sometimes what you hoped for doesn’t work out as desired, but a lot of the time wonderful things present themselves, sometimes bold, sometimes subtle.
Check out some of my photos below. Click on the images for an enlarged view:
Remember, these were taken on a tiny camera, with a fixed plastic lense, and often the film likes to scratch as it’s wound along…
These shots were taken using lomography’s 100 iso redscale film.
These two were taken with the standard 100 iso ‘lomo’ film from lomography, which has good colour saturation and contrast.
These last three shots were taken with Rollei “crossbird” 200 iso film. This is print film put through a regular C41 negative process. It did weird things, but I like some of the results. Different delicate bits of detail present themselves, along with gritting celluloid grainy, blobby bits like on the edges of the frames.
These are taken with Kodak TMAX 400 iso, black and white negative film. There’s something about the shots that I really like. They’re a little soft, and not with the full range of contrast, but there’s an abstract appeal I think. They almost look like really old paintings.
roadtrip & custom hot rods with mini diana F+ lomography camera
I recently purchased a Mini Diana F+ lomography camera as part of my own renaissance back to analogue and the world of low-fi. Keeping up with the latest digital technology is a constant demand, so now I’m back to real film. I shot 4 rolls of colour and one black and white, testing this rad little camera. You can do wacky things like multiple exposures or partially winding on the film for the next shot (check the panorama below). It’s so cute and fun to play with, and it’s probably the easiest camera I’ve ever used. Lovin’ the low-fi…
Last week I went on a road trip with the family for a week house-boating on the Murray River. I took pics the whole time. I’ve included a couple of the road trip up, and some from by the river (at the bottom). The rest of the photos are from the when I stopped off in Newstead, just out of Castlemaine for the 2009 Chopped Custom Hot Rod Show. What a great place to further test the little lomo cam! Check out the pics.
processing images to look like halftone print
I have always liked old prints that look like they are made up of many small dots. This process / look is called halftone.
Here is an example of a black and white halftone print of an old Barbarella poster. (click on the right black and white images below to see what i’m talking about)
I made a python script that sort of replicates this look, using PIL. You can grab my halftone script here.
You can create dotted images in black and white or colour. You can have white dots on a black background, or black dots on a white background. So essentially a positive or negative method of dotting. The script gets some cool results, but it is quite slow, especially when you have a smaller dot size or larger resolution source files. As it builds a new image dot by dot, the more dots the more time it takes.
Here are some of my tests. Click on the images for full effect: please note they are obviously not from photos i have taken myself, and the sources and credits are unknown.
Usage
From commandline:
python pathToLB_halftone_v1.0.py fileOrFolderToSourceFrom args
or of course, you can alias it to ‘dot’ or whatever you like.
FLAGS:
-s –squareSize Sets the number of pixels allocated for each dot shape. Eg: 6 = more small dots 16 = fewer larger dots
-c –colours Sets the script to colour mode.
-f –fileType Sets the filetype for new files created. Supported types are: [ "jpeg", "tiff", "gif", "png" ]
-n –negative Sets the script to negative mode (being black dots on a white background) rather than the default, (white dots on a black background).
The python script i have made produces image results very similar to half tone -I guess the only difference is the dots are displayed in line with each other rather than in a zigzag pattern.
I would love to use either this script or my pixelize script to process some of my animation, for a stylized effect. Even animate the dot size over time perhaps? I guess that could be another idea…
Further info on halftone.
pixelizing images with python
I’ve been playing around with PIL (python image library) learning how to mash images in various ways. This was my second script after the proxy making script. It converts an image into a pixelized version. You can choose how many pixels across (along the smaller resolution) and how many colours you wish to convert to. So some of the images end up looking like old 8 bit video game stills. Kinda cool. Obviously you get better results form using bold, contrasty pictures.
Here’s a couple of tests. Please note these are not my images, and cannot credit the photographers as I don’t know who they are.
base image
pixelized to 8 colours & 64 pixels across
pixelized to 4 colours, 64 pixels across
base image, the lovely gwen stefani
pixelized to 16 colours, 128 pixels across
pixelized to 8 colours, 96 pixels across
Most graphical programs have ways of doing this as an effect or filter. I know there is a shake node for it. Though I like it how this one you can adjust the number of colours at the same time, and it’s pretty fast. It is also setup to batch process directories of images via command line. click here to download the pixelize python script.