“Cameras are beautifully simple, they just need to expose film for a specific amount of time,” explains Ben Franke on part of his affection for cameras. “You’re often restricted to specific film formats or mediums depending on the camera, so it became a fun experiment to try to merge various cameras with mediums they’d never used before.” This is just a small part of the journey in how he came to love film and modify cameras. Ben adores Instant film, and revels in the fun, playful nature of it as you watch your photos develop right before your eyes.
Ben first got into modifying cameras from a young age. He grew up in a house where his father fixed everything that broke instead of throwing it away or buying a new one. “He taught me that you don’t need to be an engineer to interpret how things work, understand their simple mechanisms, and often find ways to improve them in the process,” he tells us. Of course, this is all part of being a photographer. After all, how many things have we fixed using Gaffers tape?
Ben Franke is a multidisciplinary artist and has been for most of his life. At 29, he picked up a camera with artistic intention — continuing the play time that he did when he was really young. His father shot videos for motorsports and always encouraged the visual arts on his son.
“Of course we all eventually got cameras on our (phones) and intentional photography faded into more of a revolving memory-collector.”
Frustrated with his career path as a lead concept designer for a circus in Las Vegas, he quit. Then he bought a one-way ticket to Iceland, a mirrorless camera, and stuck with it. But to Ben, Iceland is something far different. It’s where his grandmother is from. With a background in figure drawing, he took up a camera and photographed models around Iceland. He hasn’t put the camera down since.
Tinkering around lead to his modification of the Nikon F2. He was trying to get it to work straight off the film plane. “The trouble is, the film plane is too deep into the body, and the ejection wouldn’t fit,” Ben tells us. “So I found these old film backs for testing exposures on peel-apart film which used a 35mm frame-sized chunk of some sort of optical glass to translate images directly onto the film surface.
“Here’s a macro of my friend’s eye that I shot on a very expired pack of FP100c and a view of the original film back. Crazy how wasteful it seems. But the goal was to translate that function to instax mini.”
So Ben got to work. He took the film back and optical glass and merged it with an Instax Mini Cartridge holder from a JollyLook camera. Then he covered the back to seal any light leaks.
To take a photo, you find your frame using the waist finder, meter, and shoot. Then you manually eject the film with the JollyLook back. At the moment, he’s using a screwdriver because anything else gets blocked by the proximity to the camera body. Then you can either wind the instax half way out and shoot again for a double frame, or just keep it at one. Ben states that this can get odd though because you’re shifting the development times.
“Instant film really prefers a consistent and smooth distribution of the chemistry when ejected. “
Ben admits that it’s still a work in progress that’s more or less held together by rubber bands. But it was mostly an experiment to see what was possible. If he really wanted to continue, he’d need to 3D print a bunch of components.
Mostly, Ben gets a lot of fun out of the brainstorming, development, and execution of the mod. Oh yeah, and there’s a ton of joy that comes with seeing the photos develop.
About Ben Franke
My name is Benjamin Franke. Born in the Bay Area in ‘89, I’ve been committed to a life of creation and artistic growth my whole life. Following many decades of artistic pursuit, focused on nearly every form of traditional art and design, I graduated with a BS in Entertainment Design from Art Center College of Design in 2016. A break from the design industry lead me to exploring photography and I’ve enjoyed the long learning process so far. My current favorite medium is extremely expired and discontinued film stocks. Some people would say that I “wear many hats” and do a bit of everything in the industry and within my own passions. But all of it remains creative to some degree. I currently live in Pasadena and manage a rentable photography studio while working on a photography book sharing the best captures from the last 4 years. You can find it here.
All images by Ben Franke. Used with permission.
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