Whilst rummaging around in the local dump shop, I found an old 110 film camera for 50 pence. Now I love a good bargain, and I'd only ever shot 110 film once before with a HolgaMINI and it turned out dreadful so I thought it deserved a second chance, so I bought it. Here's what it looks like:
It's a Haminex 110 LF. I didn't know it at the time, but it was produced around 1986 making it older than me! After buying I picked up some Lomography Tiger 110 film, Lomography being pretty much the only place you can buy brand new 110 film nowadays. To my knowledge nobody else makes it? I carried it around for a while and tried to test it out in different scenarios, the flash was pretty bright and strong and the viewfinder gave the impression the lens was quite wide angle. I didn't bother until now to look up the specs, but I just tried to find some more detail and couldn't find anything. Having now used it the focal length looks to be around 50mm, far narrower than the viewfinder suggested, and I assume it to be f16 1/80 but wild guess with that one. If anyone reading this finds spec info let me know.
Anyway, as you might have guessed by now, things didn't quite go according to plan... Not a single one of the photos is usable in my opinion. AG Photo Lab dev'd my negs and I trust them with my films. I checked the negs and they scanned them in fine. The film was new, used almost immediately upon receipt, in date, and produced by Lomography so can't be at fault there, so by process of elimination something must have gone wrong camerawise. Apart from the viewfinder and the lens being wildly different focal lengths, the film is also majorly grainy, not sure if this is dust on the lens assembly, and appears to have double exposed slightly meaning the winder probably didn't work correctly. Here are some of my photos:
Ones took indoors barely turned out at all, so the flash obviously didn't make much difference! I'm disappointed because some of the ones that turned out worse than this, I'd hoped, would have made for really good photos. But I guess this is one of the pitfalls of shooting film. I'm mostly convinced it's the poor quality camera to blame, or me just not using it properly, but if I shoot any more 110 film I will most likely invest in a different camera, either a higher quality 110 camera second hand from eBay or a brand new Lomography 110 film camera. Sometimes things just don't work out, but it's best not to get too down about it! I just can't seem to get results from 110 film!