Gakkenflex

Okay I’m going to blog about this because I’m very excited about it.

The Gakkenflex is a DIY TRL toy camera that comes with Vol.25 of Otona no kagaku (大人の科學), a Japanese DIY magazine. Sis brought to my attention that Kino was carrying the mag, and with it being 20% off at Christmas now I got it for around $43, which is quite a bit cheaper than buying it online or from ThirtySix (retails at $56 I think).

It comes in this exciting styrofoam box. Doesn’t it make you feel excited just looking at it? It has “potential” and “opportunity” written all over. *gleaming eyes*

Bought it on Friday and had to wait out the weekend and be a good girl till my exams were over before I came home and happily started fiddling with it yesterday. (I think I pretty much made a beeline for it when I came home after dinnering with Walter.)

So I was too engrossed fiddling with the screws and springs and getting the shutter to work and all that I didn’t take pictures of the process. Took more than an hour, but this included taking it apart and putting it back together again because the shutter was SO fast I was almost convinced it wasn’t shuttering at all. The shutter speed is 1/125, apparently. Aperture at f/11, but there’s an aperture ring inside you that can take out if it’s really cloudy.. a bit fiddly to do that though.

Here’s the completed baby! Maybe I’ll go out tomorrow and shoot some if the weather is good.

And you have a really nice proper ‘viewfinder’ as well. It was late at night so I couldn’t really point at anything bright except my ceiling lights.

The gears on the front of the camera also all you to pull your focus as and when necessary. It’s a really great little camera that uses regular 35mm film. Have popped in an expired roll that Dad conjured up (It’s not that old, expired in 2000) and hope I’ll get some interesting shots from this. :]

Will blog about those again when I get them!

But in the meantime, here are some of the nicer shots from my first roll on the Diana F+ I borrowed from Marcius (someone I met in German class with whom I seem to have a lot of common friends with and who was from my JC but I’d never seen in my life). Meant to get myself through another roll but this Gakkenflex is definitely going to distract me from that. (Also 35mm is a lot cheaper to develop than 120 film!)