But it was mostly an experiment to see what was possible. “īen admits that it’s still a work in progress that’s more or less held together by rubber bands. “Instant film really prefers a consistent and smooth distribution of the chemistry when ejected. Ben states that this can get odd though because you’re shifting the development times. Then you can either wind the instax half way out and shoot again for a double frame, or just keep it at one. At the moment, he’s using a screwdriver because anything else gets blocked by the proximity to the camera body. Then you manually eject the film with the JollyLook back. To take a photo, you find your frame using the waist finder, meter, and shoot. Then he covered the back to seal any light leaks. He took the film back and optical glass and merged it with an Instax Mini Cartridge holder from a JollyLook camera. But the goal was to translate that function to instax mini.” “Here’s a macro of my friend’s eye that I shot on a very expired pack of FP100c and a view of the original film back. “So I found these old film backs for testing exposures on peel-apart film which used a 35mm frame-sized chunk of some sort of optical glass to translate images directly onto the film surface. “The trouble is, the film plane is too deep into the body, and the ejection wouldn’t fit,” Ben tells us. He was trying to get it to work straight off the film plane. Tinkering around lead to his modification of the Nikon F2. With a background in figure drawing, he took up a camera and photographed models around Iceland. But to Ben, Iceland is something far different. Then he bought a one-way ticket to Iceland, a mirrorless camera, and stuck with it. “Of course we all eventually got cameras on our (phones) and intentional photography faded into more of a revolving memory-collector.”įrustrated with his career path as a lead concept designer for a circus in Las Vegas, he quit. His father shot videos for motorsports and always encouraged the visual arts on his son. At 29, he picked up a camera with artistic intention - continuing the play time that he did when he was really young. After all, how many things have we fixed using Gaffers tape?īen Franke is a multidisciplinary artist and has been for most of his life. Of course, this is all part of being a photographer. “He taught me that you don’t need to be an engineer to interpret how things work, understand their simple mechanisms, and often find ways to improve them in the process,” he tells us. He grew up in a house where his father fixed everything that broke instead of throwing it away or buying a new one. Ben adores Instant film, and revels in the fun, playful nature of it as you watch your photos develop right before your eyes.īen first got into modifying cameras from a young age. “You’re often restricted to specific film formats or mediums depending on the camera, so it became a fun experiment to try to merge various cameras with mediums they’d never used before.” This is just a small part of the journey in how he came to love film and modify cameras. “Cameras are beautifully simple, they just need to expose film for a specific amount of time,” explains Ben Franke on part of his affection for cameras.
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