Lens-Artists Challenge #378: The Last Chance

Lens-Artists Challenge #378: The Last Chance

This time there's no one host to the Lens-Artists Challenge. Instead, the whole team is hosting the 'Last Chance' challenge, picking images from 2025 that either never fit in the themes of the weekly Challenge or were not included in any previous challenges.

In addition to the Lens-Artists challenge, for the past couple of years I've been dabbling with the Frugal Film Project. This is a monthly 'challenge' where for the whole year you use one camera, with a value less than $75, and one film stock for the whole year. This year, my camera of choice was the 'Golden Wonder', the Welta Penti II half-frame Soviet-era Rapid format camera. My film choice was Harman Phoenix, which might not seem that 'frugal', but since 35mm film has to be decanted into Rapid canisters in12-exposure strips, I could get at least two full canisters out of each roll of Phoenix, which made it much more economical. 

The Rapid format was also a great way to explore different film techniques. In addition to using film normally in the camera, I experimented with redscaled film, where the film was loaded reversed into the camera and exposed through the support level first. I even tried some EBS exposures, literally exposing both sides of the film. I have to admit, though, this wasn't too successful.

Of course, being me I didn't just have one Rapid camera. Oh no, I tumbled full tilt down the Rapid format rabbit hole and now have a full range of Rapid, Karat (the post-war precursor of the Rapid film system), and SL (the Soviet version of the Rapid system) cameras. Some of these cameras were awful, but there were a couple of real gems, like the Bilora Radix,  with its square format images, and the Pentacon Electra, which was an automatic camera that still works and produced some lovely results with Harman Phoenix.

In addition to using film cameras, I'm also trying to get back into some digital work, specifically glitching and circuit bending. One thing I do like finding are 'glitches in the wild', where a film, or electronic advertising hoarding, is accidentally corrupted. In this instance, a thunderstorm over the Maldives disrupted the television signal being broadcast to our villa, and of course I could not resist recording a few corrupted frames.

The featured image on this post was actually taken back in 2022 in a Lomography Sprocket Rocket, but somehow I broke the film in the camera and never managed to get it developed until this year. I also accidentally exposed the film to light when I opened the camera back, so I wasn't sure that I'd get anything. In the event, I got this wonderful trippy image, which might even be a double exposure.

The Lens-Artists Challenge is 'on holiday', until Saturday 03 January 2026 with the 'Favourite Photos of  Last Year' Challenge. Generally, themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the following week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'. This is likely to be my last weekly addition to the Challenge for a while, although I'm certainly going to keep in touch with everyones entries. I'll be concentrating on my own projects, as outlined in a previous post, my Intentions for 2026 (https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/?p=13464). 

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