A cheap Diana...

Diana cameras are not so hard to find but they can be expensive on the internet. I didn't want to pay $50-100 for a plastic toy camera. After all, I had owned one when I was 12 years old and it had only costed about $1 worth of lead pellets for the air gun at the local fair. Okay, that was a long time ago but still... A couple of weeks ago I unexpectedly ran into one of these on the sunday flea market and the seller had no idea that Dianas usually change owners for higher prices than what he wanted for it. On a clear and sunny day I loaded it with a roll of Fuji Acros 100 and headed for Brussels. Needless to say that this crappy plastic camera did not go unnoticed and that I felt slightly uncomfortable by the odd looks from the tourists with their newest digicams and phonecams. Anyway, here is a picture of the Atomium - one of the few monuments left of the Brussels 1958 world fair. The spheres were just being fitted with new aluminum plates.

A streak of sunlight catched my eye...

A streak of sunlight suddenly appeared from over the rooftops on the other side of the narrow street. It lit up one of the clipped buxus plants on this restaurants window sill. A bit of quiet poetry in a busy street leading to the Brussels Grand'Place. I prayed that the ray of light lasted long enough until all the tourists left my frame. Ilford Delta400 in Rodinal 1+7 : grain like pea soup!

Black & White Panoramics with the Xpan

The Hasselblad Xpan is a beautiful camera. It is extremely well built and very good looking and that's important too : you need a tool that you love and like to use in order to get good results from it. Unfortunately, making good pictures with an Xpan turned out to be more difficult than I expected. It took several rolls of film before I more or less came to grips with it. The 'best' results I have achieved with this camera so far were with black & white film, like the one posted here. One has to grow on this camera, instead of the other way around. For a moment I even thought the purchase of it was a mistake, but come to think of it : perhaps it's a good thing that the tool is a bit of a challenge to use. Would you rather be bored with a new camera right away? And in that case, can you expect different or better pictures from it than from your other gear? Learning to master the Xpan is demanding and requires patience, and that is something we all have too little of these days. Lesson learnt.