Read­ing Diana Xpro

I’ve been work­ing through scan­ning a moun­tain of old films. Here’s some from 2004. I was living in Read­ing and study­ing at the univer­sity there. I also hand­ily had a part-time job in a film lab, result­ing in free devel­op­ment. At the time I got a cd of the photos, but I have no idea what happened to it.

I took these with a Diana camera  (check the link- the Junk­store Camer­as site is lot of fun and has been around since forever). Not the Lomo resur­rec­tion, an origin­al 60s version I got in a char­ity shop. It really was a heap of junk. I used it a couple of times, and it essen­tially fell apart in my hands. The shut­ter and the spring just disin­teg­rated. Later on I got one of the re-issues and it was defin­itely stur­di­er.

It’s some kind of expired Fuji slide film, cross-processed (ie slide film developed in print film chem­ic­als to give weird colours). At that time digit­al camer­as were coming in and a lot of shops were cutting down on the film they sold. This meant there were often expired rolls to be had for very cheap. 

The camera really doesn’t focus well. This was a weird little park near my house. It had a sunken basket­ball court, also lined with these white bricks. It wasn’t obvi­ous that the park even exis­ted from the main road, and it always had an eerie atmo­sphere. Most of the streets in the area were a grid of Victori­an two-up-two-downs, but there was also the badly-planned square of 60s houses just kind of plonked in there- arranged around a foot­path, a carpark and the basket­ball place.

I don’t know what this was meant to be a photo of. The view­find­er on the camera was essen­tially useless.

The mighty River Kennet. Aka the same canal that runs through Kings­land Road in London

Again the view­find­er was useless. I was obvi­ously hoping to get the yellow sign in there.

The local book­ies. The kind of place with a sign saying “Turf Account­ant” run by an ancient old man, and with sever­al equally ancient old custom­ers always sitting at the counter.

Light leaks! And the many ultra-bland blocks of flats of Read­ing town centre.

The weird sunken basket­ball court.