Goodbye Diana…

It’s not a person, it’s a camera. I recently got a secondhand Diana Mini, because I liked that it was ridiculously small and light, and that you could take either square or half-frame photos with it (and switch between the two between shots). I don’t think there are any other cameras still in production that take square shots on 35mm film.  Of course, I could just take normal rectangular shot and crop it, but that doesn’t force you to compose your shot for a square.

Diana Mini

The lens is plastic, so from a technical point of view it’s a bit crap, but the shots have a certain something, a dreamy vagueness to them. I like the effect.

St Chad’s

Fish Street

And now the camera has broken, as the shutter lever, which was a bit stiff, has now snapped. I’d only shot one roll with it, so this is very annoying. This is the downside to things being light; plastic snaps. It was secondhand, so its unlikely I’ll get them to replace it for me.

I might buy another one*. Or I could save my pennies and add them to the ‘film developing’ fund.

 

 

*Or maybe it could be argued that I enough cameras already.

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Multiple Bridge

Multiple Bridge

I’ve recently bought a Diana Mini, a Lomography camera which is plastic and very very small. It takes either 24mm x 24mm square photos or half-frame photos. It is also very handy for taking multiple exposure shots with, as the shutter is mostly independent of the film winder.

Diana Mini, Agfa Vista Plus 200.

(there are more of my photos on my photo blog thing at mostlytrees.wordpress.com)

Chrome OS? erm… no

It makes sense on paper, since most of our computer use is on the web, why not make a computer Operating System  optimised for web use? This is what Chrome OS (or Chromium OS) is. Instead of having a hard drive full of stuff, all of your stuff is on the internet somewhere in the cloud…

There is a version of this operating system tweaked for my Dell Inspiron Mini that can be booted form a USB stick, so I thought I’d try that. It booted ok, the browser was ok, (in fact that’s near enough all there is to it) it was fairly quick too (not something these netbooks are known for) But I just had the urge to save things to my hard drive, or watch/listen to stuff stored on the netbook. This is not what it is for, and you more or less can’t do it (at least it didn’t like my MPG files, and refused to play them). I think the fault is with me, rather than the concept, too old and set in my ways.

I’m glad I hadn’t installed it, only run it from memory stick. Back to Windows 7 (which isn’t really that bad, I was just bored, really). Unless I install Linux…