Instax

First try - light setting

Out of focus

Let me introduce you to our third analog camera, the Instax. As you might have guessed it's an instant camera, we have the wide one so the pictures are bigger than a Polaroid and they are rectangular. I'm not sure how we ended up with it, well Tom ordered it on eBay, but I don't know where he got the idea from.

It is a very easy camera to use. The film is inside some sort of black rectangular plastic box, you just need to open the camera and push the box in. The little yellow mark goes on the yellow mark so you know which way to put it in. The first film is not an actual picture so you don't need to aim at anything. And then you are ready to go.

Brighton Beach

Brighton Pier

Brighton Beach

There are three settings: light, normal, dark. And two settings for the focal: 1 to 3 metres and 3 metres to infinity. Every time you turn the camera off it automatically goes back to 1 to 3 metres focal setting. I made the mistake once not to check, my picture came out slightly blurry but in a nice way enough. I'm pretty sure it will happen again anyway. We tried once the light setting, the picture came out quite over exposed and faded. We haven't tried out the dark setting yet, London sun has not been exactly blinding lately. So we usually use the normal setting in focus, and it turns out quite nicely for outside pictures.

Yayoi Kusama - Tate Modern

Now, I'm less convince by inside pictures and even less by the flash. You can put it on even when it would usually go off but you can't turn it off and I find that very annoying. We thought that the fact you have a flash button meant you could chose, so when we went to the Tate Modern we took a picture in one of Yayoi Kusama's rooms. The room was all in the dark with fluorescent dots. The flash went off and you can't see that the room was in the dark. We were very disappointed and we also got a bit scared they would kick us out! We had a read on the Internet to see what were people solutions, and we try to cover it. It doesn't really work as the light still goes off and the picture doesn't come out very nice. The Instax, like the lomo, needs a lot of light. Other inconvenience, it is huuuuge! Not something you easily put in your bag, well you need a big bag, at least it's not heavy.

We are planning to use it for the wedding - it might actually be where the idea is coming from - we want portraits of all of our guests and the setting. Now we know we need to take them outside of the marquee! Six weeks to go, I can't believe it!