Instax Photo Collage Optical Illusion 102

Have you ever accidentally pressed the eject button on your instant-back adapter before taking a photo? If so, you have likely been crushed thinking about what an incredible waste it is to have to discard these instant “blanks”. Well you no longer have to let them go to waste. You can re-purpose these blanks to create cool photo collages.

Be sure to hold on to any “waste” or “blank” Instax film, as there are many possible uses for them in the future. I recently realized that I had a very large stack of blanks and wanted to do something creative with them. One of the best things about these blanks is that they are black and white, so I decided to apply the principle of using dark space to optimize double exposures.

Here is what I did:

I took my stack of Instax blanks…

and spread them out in a random pattern on top of a black background:

Next, I loaded some film into my camera, and captured this image on each frame. I altered the angle and distance for each shot so that they would all be slightly different. Then I rewound the film, reloaded it, and shot various images (i.e. portraits, landscapes, randoms, etc.). The results are almost exactly what I pictured in my head when I came up with this idea.

It’s a photo-collage without actually being a collage.

I hope you enjoy and experiment with this. I know I will certainly be repeating this technique, and hopefully building on it. <3