Dan the Lab Assistant

Thanks for joining me on this weird little journey.

Links to my three disposable camera below.

Disposable Camera series, no.3: The Birthday Gift

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Suppose that for her birthday, Ellie received a gift from somebody in Jackson. A new friend, or maybe Maria. A rare treasure from the old world - a little yellow plastic Kodak camera containing a full roll of unexposed film. As a curious and creative soul, it would be the perfect thing to take along on her birthday hike with Joel to a surprise location in the forest.

As before, we’re working with a cheap piece of hardware, designed to take functional pictures in bright sunlight, though thankfully on this occasion there’s plenty of sunshine to use. In the dark museum, we’re really gonna need the flash.

The film is degraded, and the developing facilities are not ideal. In Jackson there’s an old abandoned pharmacy (guess which one), and Eugene has managed to bring the processing machines back to life. In a warehouse not far out of town we found some leftover chemicals and other supplies (even a stack of faded red envelopes to store your prints).

We don’t know Ellie’s birth date, we only know it must be in the summer — nobody is hiking in Wyoming in a tank top outside of June, July or August. So I’ve given my best guess. Hopefully one day we find out the real date.

Once again please enjoy, and if you share please remember to credit.

Disposable Camera series, no.2: The Farm

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What are the odds? It happened again!

Ellie chased down the boar into the abandoned gas station near Jackson. As it lays, wheezing and injured just out of sight, Ellie creeps through the darkness with rifle trained into the corner where the hurt animal sounds are originating from. Just then, a flash of yellow catches the corner of her eye. On the bottom shelf, an unused but usable Kodak disposable film camera sits on the shelf.

Same rules as before: a camera like this takes mostly bad pictures. And that's at the best of times. After 25 years gathering dust in an old gas station this thing can only barely function, and the film is highly degraded. We're including all 24 shots on the roll, including the duds.

The date in the corner is not canonical, it's based upon my best guess derived from the clues in the game. T-shirt weather in the Wyoming mountains doesn't begin until June (according to Wikipedia), though the nights can still be cold. Let me know if you have a better estimate.

Again, I hope you enjoy!

(Original game photography from The Last Of Us Part II by @westonspharmacyphotodept, created with all manual post-production using no presets, templates, stock or AI).

Conceptual series -- Disposable Camera

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What if, during their first patrol together, Ellie and Dina found a disposable camera in a drawer at the radio station?

For those of you who’ve never experienced the joy of the disposable film camera, they are made of flimsy plastic and contain the cheapest consumer-grade film. They’re designed to take a single type of exposure, with a set shutter speed, aperture and focus, and the best shooting conditions are bright daylight.

Outside of the ideal shooting conditions, you need to activate the flash to yield a usable picture. Red eye is inevitable. The flash is also set to fire at a specific power, so standing either too close or too far from your subject means they’ll either be too bright or too dark.

It’s very difficult to get perfect conditions for every shot, so when you take the film for processing (to Weston’s Pharmacy, of course), the processing machine automatically tries to compensate for pictures that are too dark or too bright. The result is often an extremely crushed dynamic range, and a lot of grain. They look crappy, but that’s part of the fun.

After 25 years in a desk drawer, I like to think that not only would the film have degraded quite a bit, but the housing would have lost some integrity and sprung a leak. This camera has a very slight crack in the housing, which leaks light when the camera is taken out into the daylight.

Typically, there are 24 exposures in one of these cameras, so I have included all 24 pictures that Ellie and Dina took together, including the duds. Some of you may point out that disposable cameras didn’t produce a date stamp in the bottom corner — this is true, however I think it adds to the effect I was going for, and also since we know the canonic date that this patrol happened, I thought it would be a cool detail to include it.

I hope you enjoy!

(Original game photography from The Last Of Us Part II by @westonspharmacyphotodept, created with all manual post-production using no presets, templates, stock or AI).

Grief

Your first mistake was trying to escape via the subway. In the darkness, you were never going to evade all of the infected standing in your path to safety. One bite was all it took, and although you fought off the monster who'd delivered it, your die was cast, and in a few hours your transformation was complete. You became just the latest amongst tens of millions who had been consigned to the same fate - you are infected by cordyceps. Now you exist in a state of eternal delirium, pacing back and forth, shivering and groaning while your last scraps of tortured sanity wrestle against the slow, inevitable creep of total fungal madness.

Your second mistake was standing in their path.

Do you still hear his screams?

Maybe we stopped looking for the light

I saved her

*distant whistles*

I'm not like you

What is goin' on?!

Outbreak day, an attempt at the cinematic photography style of Gregory Crewdson

What were you dreaming about?

You were stupid to come back here

Have you found the light yet?

You have no idea what loss is

Everyone in this city is a fucking psycho.