Still riding the high of throwing caution to the wind with my film, I bought myself a couple of cheap Reto cameras to play around with. You can pick these up on Amazon or at some Urban Outfitters locations for about $25 in a variety of cute colors and they are as basic as they get. The cameras are plastic and have no way to control aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focus, NOTHING. These are pure point and shoot cameras with no frills or fancy glass, and that’s ok! It’s kind of freeing in a way…if your images are garbage, you can just blame the inability to control virtually any aspect of your shot, ha!
For my first roll, I shot another blind double go around, this time mainly focusing on using either a prism or a ball of metallic confetti held up to the lens and pointed at the sun. I did also shoot some colorful honeycomb pendant decorations and brightly striped towels, but those didn’t really come out. I had only a couple of small crocuses available at this time of year up in Alaska, so sadly I only got one frame out of those. After rewinding the film, I shot through it again using my kids and our neighbor as test subjects as they went about enjoying a spring day.
The Reto camera’s lower lens quality is evident (as expected) with its lack of clarity, but I find that it lends the images an almost dreamlike quality. I also learned that if you point the camera at the sun while taking a shot, it results in a light ring on the image, which can be kind of cool at times. You’ll also notice what I’m going to call a “frame break” on the right hand side of each image. This is simply due to the frames not lining up perfectly after rewinding and then reshooting the film. Personally, I kind of like it.
A few days later, my husband and I took our dog on a walk down to the only sand beach in Anchorage. Our little husky mutt had never felt the sand on his paws before, and I think it’s safe to say that he loved it! For this roll, I decided to soup it. I was really curious to see if the Reto would be up to being my go-to “souping” camera, but I think it fell a bit short. However, the atmospheric conditions were far from ideal for film soup. It was incredibly dense fog that day and therefore quite low light. Considering the Reto’s aperture is a set f22(!), this was already going to be an uphill battle for the camera.
After shooting the roll and getting home, I souped it in boiling water, maple syrup, buttermilk, salt, and dish soap. For those of you paying attention, this is a much different formula than I used on my roll from Santa Barbara. I’m not happy with these results, but I honestly don’t know which variable to blame: the low quality camera, poor atmospheric conditions, or subpar soup concoction. Guess I’ll just have to give it another go soon!
As you can see, there was a definite purplish pink shift in these film soup images. Kinda cool, a bit unexpected, but that’s the beauty of souping your film! I just wish the images themselves had been a bit crisper, maybe a touch less grain. I’m planning on giving it another go around at some point this month, although I probably won’t use the Reto for it this time. In other news, I did send my girls on their school field trips with a Reto for each of them and will be getting those scans back tomorrow, so we’ll see what that gives us!