Just for fun

A few of my fellow Viewfinders have written about a little film camera they have picked up to play around with – the Kodak Ektar 45. It shoots only half a frame at a time, doubling your potential images per roll of film. It also has the possibility of creating a whole roll full of diptychs right there, printed out for you.

This past summer I decided to pick up my own copy of this little guy just to give it a whirl. It’s not terribly expensive, it’s light, compact, and was the perfect little film addition to my family’s annual trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It’s a mostly motor-less series of lakes stretching across more than a million acres in far northern Minnesota. You travel by canoe, and tent camp along your routes. It’s something my family has come to cherish and look forward to every year. And it’s something I’ve wanted to capture more with film, but hauling around everything you need on your back forces limiting gear choices. Enter this little Ektar.

Now, I certainly don’t have it down very well, and I haven’t played with it a whole lot to really get the hang of it, but I don’t think I’ve had more fun simply using a camera in quite a while. It was also great to just hand off to my kids who loved the chance to use another piece of my gear – ha!

My film developer took the liberty of separating out each image, as opposed to leaving the original diptychs intact. I’m not sure I would prefer that, so I am going to need to look into either asking that they be left as is or seeking out another developer next time I send a roll in.