Looking at Moni’s photos is like stepping into a fairytale. She creates an exquisitely quaint dreamland, lit by milky sunlight and peppered with sunkissed greenery. These pictures look like snippets of a wonderful forest adventure, of jumping over streams and picking berries. Moni also has some beautifully simple self-portraits bathed in white light, marvellously capturing the texture of the hair and the delicate position of tentative fingers. I have always been mesmerised by the beauty of hands: the flexibility of the dexterous digits, the creases in the skin, the fumbling action of the fingers when they are unsure of themselves.

These pictures are all about the gorgeous intricacies of life. The light, the growth, the complex experience of a living organism. The world seeps in from all edges, vast and unwieldy and demanding attention. What I take from Moni’s photos is a sense of peace, a fundamental calm within the chaos of our world. They make me feel tiny, as if buzzing around with little wings, skimming puddles and resting on leaves, looking out shyly at the plane of vision with infant wonder as the dust dances around my rosy, peeking face.

Photography is, more often than not, the endeavour to capture and thus make sense of a dizzying world, and Moni does that well, and very sweetly, with these dreamy photos.

All photos taken from Moni’s Flickr.

Rosanna Jones is an experimental photographer heavily interested in portrait and fashion photography. Her darkroom fiddling, heavily applied to one particular photo series of hers, really brings her work into it’s own vast space and blows a heavy breath of liveliness into the images in question.

Her Darkroom series is dark and messy, just like life. Threads of human life, fraying at the edges, left in a damp attic for years to wither and crumble. Like a life abandoned or a life wrecked, the photos carry with them a curious narrative, not an explicit story, but a visceral sense of life and living and all the personal mysteries held within. The rich blacks and spooky grey tones render the pictures as if they were peeks into caves or wells, with secrets and complexities lurking deep inside them. The messy scratches and marks call up all those uncertain emotions we know so well; confusion, anxiety, fear. They bring to the surface of the images a sense of a life being slowly erased, an allegory for the effect of time and history on individuals: we will all fade, after a while.

Blurry, grainy realities and splodges of mystery fluids with double exposures creeping out from underneath give these photos a feeling of the occult, too. Her subjects seem lost in a bubbling ether of witchcraft and dark leaves, though even in their menacing surroundings their humanity seeps through inevitably, leaving an unstoppable imprint of themselves.

Photos via Cargo Collective.

I got my Lomo Oktomat for Christmas in 2009 and snapped away during the holiday. I thought it would be a great camera to have because you would technically be getting more photos, as each frame contains the 8 mini photos that make up one picture. I thought the design was cute too. I loved the bright red of the main body and the colourful bits around the lenses.

My first thought was that it would be a great camera to mace funny faces at, because it would record the movement, so this photo was made:

I love the way it came out so dark.

The main great thing about the Lomo Oktomat is the fluidity it allows you in your photo-taking. Any movement is captured perfectly, so you can get great shots of fast-moving subjects, such as pets or vehicles. It brings a certain livelihood to the images to see a sequence of action captured, and then of course you can make them into nifty little animations, like so:

(I used PicSlice and Iaza to make these)

Here are the shots from my experimental first Okto roll.

Unfortunately I only managed to get this one roll out of it before it stopped working. I’m not sure why, but future rolls would come out completely blank. I figured that light must be coming in somewhere and exposing the film. It’s a real shame because I loved the camera a lot, but I’ve heard a lot of Lomo Oktomat owners saying that their Oktomat broke, so perhaps it’s time for Lomo to make a sturdier and more reliable Oktomat 2? I’m sure it would be a welcome and celebrated improvement. For now though, I’ll stick with the Disderi Robot 3 for all my multi-lense needs (I do quite fancy an action sampler though).

My first camera was a big blue Fisher Price camera when I was four years old, in 1995. I was given it to record my trip to Florida with my Dad and Grandma. I don’t remember the holiday very much, aside from becoming completely enamored with Froot Loops, but fortunately I have the few pictures I took to act as memories.

I vaguely remember Sea World (I got myself a nice cuddly toy killer whale), and I have an extremely fuzzy memory of the ET ride.

A month after the holiday, my dad was dead, and analogue photographs became an integral part of my memories of him, tying them together like visual threads.

In any case, cameras had been a firmly embedded part of my early life. As expected, my family recorded everything and now I can look back on the dated furniture and terrible haircuts with a wistful sort of joy.

I even had a posh baby shot done:

I now present you with a progression of my growth from pink-faced baby to grump-filled adult:

I always very much enjoyed snapping away with carefree abandon, and as anticipated, I have grown into quite the photography-obsessed adult, occasionally ridiculed for the sheer amount of plastic cameras bulging in my bag at any one time.

Disappointed with an abundance of rubbish prints of shots that went wrong? Building up a shelf full of photographic embarrassment? Never fear, here’s a way to make use of those sad photos.

As a poor unemployed artist with an expensive analogue photo habit, every bad shot reminds me of the neat little hole it’s making in my wallet, and simultaneously I yearn for delicious boards and canvases to butter with acrylics to my heart’s desire. So what better way to get rid of those displeasing prints than to turn them into something I can be proud of?

All you’ll need are some correction fluid and a pen or two (markers are best for the glossy photo paper). Simply dump some correction fluid on your photo and tip your photo or use the correction fluid’s brush to form a pleasing shape. Then just leave it to dry. Sometimes this step alone is enough to transform your photo into something lovely.

Once it’s dry, just draw something else on top! You could also incorporate collage (handy for when a section of a photo turned out great), or anything you like. Let your artistic side loose, and don’t despair at bad photos anymore. Every one is an opportunity.