The Disposable challenge

When a friend suggested that we get a group of photographers together and hand them each a cheap plastic disposable cameras and see what comes of it I thought he was mad! It didn't take me long to warm to the idea. I love the romance of film, but I prefer the reality of digital. The ability to see in an instant if I nailed the shot really beats waiting for a week to see if I managed to get something useable. Digital saps the confidence in my own ability and film makes me second guess every frame I take!

Having said that I am also one for a challenge so armed with my plastic Kodak Ultra Compact with the very special "Ektanar"plastic lens I took up his challenge! Challenge does somewhat understate the mechanics of exercise. The only thing we knew for sure was the film was 800ISO. It is what we didn't know that made the challenge challenging. No hint of the aperture, shutter speed or if and when the dinky onboard flash would fire all lead to some fun and games.

There were no limits except you had to post on flickr 24 of your possible 27 shots!

First thing I did was make a cover for the flash so I could have some control over when it fired. I dug around in my kit to find some close up filers that I could hold over the lens to make the camera macro and then I crossed my fingers and hoped for a result.

Three weeks after opening the box I saw my shots for the first time. Three were thinner than noodless chicken noodle soup and therefore totally unusable. 24 just scraped in and to my surprise some were actually quite good.

Have a peek for yourself and if you would like to see the work of the others you can follow this link... http://www.flickr.com/groups/1853426@N20/