Personal Identity- Documenting around the house

I decided to move away from the disposable cameras, it was a fun experiment but to document ordinary objects and routines I had to use something more convenient so I chose to use my phone and the app called Lens + which I used earlier in the light leaks photo. I was focusing on capturing unusual angles on things that go unnoticed. I am really pleased with the results of these photos.

I don't know why these 2 are the wrong way round :/

Personal Identity- Albert Hastings

 I decided to go to the library to look at photography books, just for fun and inspiration and came across one called 'The day-to-day life of Albert Hastings' The book is all about this woman following this old man, Albert around and documenting his daily life, from the moment he wakes up till the moment he goes to bed. It was really well done and gave you an insight into someone elses life, a peek into their routine. It was almost as if you shouldn't be looking like with my Mum's photos. His daily routine was quite boring and that was the point, the way she took the photos were at unusual angles, but on purpose to make them look more exciting. I had the same idea I could do using my disposable cameras, so I ruined the lens again and this time took photos of random boring objects, however I did not have the same results as last time. I didn't ruin the lens ENOUGH and the photos just came out really boring again. Below are a few scans from the Albert Hastings book and some of the photos I tried...

Personal Identity- Disposable distortion

Still thinking about modern ways to create old photos I found myself looking at disposable cameras so off I went to Boots and as luck would have it, it was buy 1 get 1 free.. woo! two new cameras to play with :) I knew that the photos wouldn't be great quality (after all this is why i bought them) but I knew they wouldn't look old either. I was a bit stuck on what to photo though and decided I'd type disposable cameras into google, just to see if anyone had produced anything interesting with them and to my surprise I found a load of websites and flickr groups dedicated to ruining these cameras. This was right up my street and decided to delve further, here are the websites and groups that I found..

http://content.photojojo.com/diy/ten-creative-ways-to-use-disposable-cameras/ 

http://gizmodo.com/5649180/22-experiments-with-disposable-cameras 

http://www.flickr.com/groups/95028261@N00/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/30749835@N00/

This one is someones photo stream on flickr where they've used all sorts of different chemicals on the camera/film. http://www.flickr.com/photos/senoranderson/collections/72157603261834220/

I then found this great website http://kodakmoments27.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/hannahs-recent-flickr-upload_15.html that showed even more ruined film. 

After searching through these groups I found a lot of people would ruin the lens and flash by colouring over itadding scratches, even painting nail varnish over the top. I thought this was great, a perfect way to get amazing photos and I don't know why I never thought of it myself. 

I had so much fun with this experiment and was literally dying with excitement to get the photos back. Heres how I ruined the lens and flash. I used pink and green highlighter pens, clear nail varinish and then coloured over it with wax crayon and the results are amazing! Look below

What I loved about those photos was how dream world they were and how ruining the lens turned each photo into something magical. However some didn't turn out aswell as those and they were mainly the ones taken indoors.

Personal Identity- light leaks & coloured cellophane

I did really enjoy trying to create spontaneous pictures, but I wanted to look at other things, other reasons why I originally liked my Mum's photos. One of the main things I love about retro photography and using toy cameras is how you can get accidental light leaks. I don't believe they ruin a photo, they make it much more fascinating and creative. However if you wanted to purposefully try to get light leaks it would be very hard as we all know opening the back of the camera could lead to all your photos turning black! And as I didn't want to risk this and wasting the money getting them developed I used my phone once again! I really enjoy using my phone to recreate vintage photos because not only is it cheap and easy, but there are so many apps out there with different realistic filters of that of an old camera, its pretty impressive and a lot of fun to mess around with.

Below are some examples of light leaks from the web and one that I did by accident

My accidental light leak. Only faint, but you can make out a blue splodge at the top of the photo.

These are the ones I did on my phone on purpose..

To create the light leaks on here, its more of a sun flare and I had to point my phone in a certain direction, however using a different app called lens+ it already has the leaks on the filter and it will create them on EVERY photo you take if you select that filter, as you can see here...

The filter is actually called 'holga' as it's supposed to represent the same effects you can get using a holga camera which is another one part of the lomography series. I definitely want to experiment with this app later.

I next moved my attention to trying to create the same pink and yellow tints my Mum's photos had but using a standard digital camera rather than my phone and I thought one way to do this was to use coloured cellophane! Iv'e heard of other people trying this and thought I'd give it a go. I held the cellophane in front of the lens and these are the results!

Here I doubled up the pink colour.. TOO vibrant!

and same here!

The green one didn't seem to make any difference.

Carrying on using the cellophane I started thinking about collections again and photographing some sort of vintage object in different colours of the cellophane. I found my typewriter and photographed it at the same angle and position each time but each with a different colour.

 I think the results of using the cellophane as a coloured filter are too much, they are not subtle enough.