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Formerly Bitter Man Has Fun in the Woods

Thursday March 14, 2024

I briefly mentioned my new Instax camera in my last post but I’ll go into more detail here.

A few years ago my girlfriend got a free Fujifilm Instax 8 and for a while I was a hater. I didn’t see the point of taking a tiny film photo if she was just going to take a picture of the picture with her phone right after, just for Instagram to further shit up the quality after that. I still mostly believe that is stupid, but that’s mostly because I don’t like Instagram. The tiny film prints are actually great, and I was wrong to write them off as stupid.

There are now many, many mini prints in my possesion that I would call “classics.” If they were taken on someone’s phone they would probably never be seen by me again, collecting dust in someone else’s phone gallery. If it was sent to me, it’d probably be compressed by some messaging service, saved onto whatever device I’m using, and never printed. Having real, dated, physical evidence of my girlfriend’s Mario Party wins on my fridge is cool. I got an Instax SQ6 because I love square photos, as you can probably tell by my gallery page.

When I saw the topic for the festival was “nature”, I realized that there is a huge lack of nature in my life. My idea of enjoying nice weather is playing video games in my garage with the door open. I don’t go outside all that much, honestly. When I am outside, it doesn’t feel like I’m with nature. It just feels like I’m in the suburbs. So I had the genius idea to go walk around with my new camera in the woods nearby to take pictures with my girlfriend. In my note where I was brainstorming ideas, I mentioned that “she would eat that shit up.” I was right. Before she even got her shoes on, she said “This is the best day of my life.”

I took more than 3 pictures but those are the ones that actually came out okay. Using the “darker” mode on this camera was needed to get anything decent, because otherwise the colors would be totally blown out due to the sunlight. I noticed after I scanned them that the pictures always turn out a little blurry, which I think has to do with Instax cameras having plastic lenses instead of glass. Maybe one day I’ll get a nicer camera that uses the same square film like this one. For now, I’ll learn what I can with what I have.

You can find other posts written for the Lainchan Spring Festival here.