Once upon a time, the humble disposable 35mm camera was the sort of thing you found sitting on tables at a wedding reception, in the hands of elderly women pointing at tourist eyesores, or stuffed in the travel bag of children off on school camp. Invariably, the shots would be muddled, poorly composed snaps of red-eyed drunks, or Aunty Mavis standing next to a WWI plaque, or Baby Tom’s confused attempts at dealing with 1st birthday chocolate cake. Often, the blurry flesh colour of a misplaced finger would jut into the frame, almost the signature of the disposable camera.

At Melbourne Silver Mine however, we believe there is no such thing as a bad camera. If it has film, a lens and a shutter, you can make magic. So we took it upon ourselves to prove this point by setting our members the challenge – to take a disposable camera and push it to its artistic limits.

The theme chosen was “GIRT” in honour of national anthem, and the fact that the day of the Disposable Camera Challenge meet-up was 26th January – Australia Day.

It was a tough assignment, but the participants rose to the challenge. Those pesky little cameras proved tough beasts to tame – we chose an ISO 800 camera, hoping this would give us more lighting options to shoot in, but in the end, many of us were beaten by the fast shutter speed, giving us a variety of over or under exposed shots depending on the situation. Some of us taped polarizing filters over the lens, others lens hoods, or SFX filters. Others still chose to set up elaborate shots, and were often beaten by the rather long minimum focus required. A tough task indeed!

In the end, we gathered the cameras, developed and scanned the shots and posted one shot from each roll up to the flickr group for voting upon.

Barbara Fischer, with her wonderful shot of a contemplative gent floating in the sea was the winning entry:

Runners Up –

Michael Verhoef with a unqiue view of being “Girt by Daisies”

and Damien Coup’s shot of a single leaf, “Girt by Pond”

Finally, an honourable mention must also go to Jesse Swallow, for his unique take on the theme:

Barbara’s winning entry can be seen on show during UNSENSORED09.

For those who missed the challenge this time round, fear not, we’ll be having another in the not too distant future.