A Rare Old New Vintage Diana Camera

Authentic vintage Diana cameras are rare. I searched a very long time before I found a functional one on ebay for $9 a year ago. To be clear, there are dozens of “Diana” cameras for sale on ebay, used and new. There’s a company called Lomography that has been making new Dianas, which they claim are identicial to the original. I wish Lomography had chosen another name but they couldn’t because their whole thing is capitalizing on the vintage Diana’s reputation. So 99 out of 100 “Diana” cameras for sale anywhere are not the original version. Worse than that, everyone selling the imitation Dianas includes the word, ‘vintage’ in their description, which isn’t true at all. Fuckers.

(There are also a dozen or so brands of vintage Diana clones being listed as ‘vintage Diana’ that clearly aren’t.)

But I found a vintage Diana for $9 plus shipping. It was cheap and still available because it looked to be in very rough condition. The first thing I had to do was remove all the duct tape and re-tape the camera’s seams and joints with electrician’s tape, which is superior for this purpose. By wasting a couple rolls of film, I learned where else to apply more tape to stop the light leaks.

Many people say the light leaks are part of the charm on vintage cameras, but I find them annoying. If the leaks were random in origin, shape, size, or…