Diana was always a camera you could do things with, which you could not do with other cameras. And the reason was: it was so cheap, that if you crash it, it does not matter. I even fixed it to a kite get a bird's view. The shutter I operated by a pendulum mechanism which just made click on a certain angle (which corresponded to the pre-calculated flight height). Then I put it into a sewage pipe and used it for my own kind of underwater photography. I have to say though, that there is not much to see in the lakes and ponds of the Westerwald. What else can be said about Diana? Well, just that it was a really bad camera - 35 years ago. It is really not much different from a Camera Obscura, just that it has a lens and not just a hole. And I guess it is simply put one of the world's worst cameras.
Now, something called Lomography has become a fashion and Diana (and her sisters) are reborn. Strange for me, because every mobile phone can take better pictures than a "Lomo". In the online shop, you have the choice between many different models in the range between about US$ 50 up to over US$ 100. People meet for Lomo-Events and pin their photos to walls and talking pictures with it seems a cult. In the Lomography shop which I found today were a few girls which only had frames for glasses on their noses. This is also a strange fashion I have now often seen in Asia. I suggested that if did not forget to put glasses in their frames, their might actually be able to see how bad their pictures are. But they just giggled. Never mind. I think it is actually think it is nice they have a hobby like that and I regretted a minute later that I said something so nasty.
I took the picture of the shop above and post edited it with a cross color algorithm and then a preset function called "Toy Camera". But it is still not what a Diana would make it look like. Today's Dianas I have seen are actually not made in Russia, but in China. Would be nice if the good old (and I mean literally "good old") Voiglaenders also could make it back like this. And when I think about all the old Chinese camera brands which are actually so much better then a Lomograph, then there are quite a few nice things which can be done to get them alive again.