My Grandfather gave me his old Keystone 8mm Home Movie Camera a while back, along with three awesome Wallensak Cine Raptar D lenses; a telephoto, a 13mm, and a 9mm wide angle lens. They’re all metal, have manual apertures, and are super tiny. I’m impressed by how durable they are. They sure don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
Last summer I found a couple 110 cameras with expired, half-used film in them at a thrift store. I added to my arsenal with a Holga Micro-110 and a roll of Fuji 200 I purchased online, and I set out shooting.
Last Fall I purchased this sprightly little plastic camera from an antique store. Even though I knew its flash bulb would be basically impossible to replace, I liked the camera’s weird name and vintage design, and I thought it would be fun to shoot some 120 film with.
At home I quickly realized the camera was defunct, made for an extinct film format called 127. I tried to jam a roll of 35mm film into the back, but there just wasn’t enough room. The only hope was a pitch black room and a whole lot of electric tape.
I found this little plastic camera at an antique store and payed way too much for it. I liked its weird look and ridiculously parallax circular viewfinder.
Opening it up, I found a used role of Pan 127 film, a very extinct format.
Finally finished: my photo reel for 2012.
This is my first attempt at putting my photography into a video format. I’ve been shooting with vintage and plastic lo-fi cameras for a few years now, and last February I took my Holga 35 into the city for a little adventure. I think this is the only time I’ve ever shot so many strong images on one roll of film. Usually I only get a few good shots per roll, but there was just something magical about that day, and the fact that the diffusion was so strong and I was shooting with Kodak T-Max 400, which has a really nice rough grain to it, helped a ton. I’m working on a new demo reel and I’m going to attempt to put some of my photography into it, so this was good practice.
The awesome team over at Fourcornersdark.com just featured an interview with me on their website. In it I talk about my love of toy photography. Check it out here.
I bought a Superheadz Golden Half camera for my birthday in August. It’s a Japanese-made plastic half-frame camera that shoots two photographs on one frame of 35mm film. I’ve been really enjoying shooting with it lately. Every roll I shoot brings out a different aspect of the camera, my favorite being the soft focus on the edges of the frame. Here are some of my favorite shots so far.
(But apparently some people think they share more in common with Dumbledore.)
This summer I got hooked. I found some websites, read some articles, looked at some jpegs and fell in love. Over the summer my collection has grown from one plastic 35mm camera to seven cameras of various sizes, shapes, and film types. I’ve shot more rolls of film than I ever have before and created some really exciting images.
I’m still new at this, but I’ve already taken some grief from my photography friends. They think my toy photography is either dumb or pretentious or both. I just think its fun. I guess I don’t take the actual photographic process very seriously, just what comes out of that process. For me it’s not a job or a competition, it’s a game and an adventure. I never know what I’m going to get.
But this isn’t completely true. I feel that regardless of the lo-fi nature of my cameras, I have grown in my photographic art. By shooting with no options in regards to lens choice, depth of field, or zoom, I’ve been forced to focus on the subject matter of my shots. I’ve learned about the importance of human interest and the placement of subjects in the frame. I’ve also had the opportunity to create some very distorted and crazy images. And it’s been a blast!
Here are some of my favorite Toy Camera shots from this summer.
I got my first roll of film back from shooting with my new Olympus Pen-EE, and I wasn’t very impressed. Most of the shots were extremely overexposed. I’ve seen other photographers work with the Pen-EE online and I can only guess that mine is defective. It might be the shutter, it’s a bit sticky. The blur is caused by the shutter, the only way I can keep it from sticking is by jamming down hard on the shutter release whenever I take a picture, which causes the camera to shake. Oh well.
These two shots came out okay, in an impressionistic sort of way. I’m really intrigued by the whole half frame thing. If I ever get a half-frame camera that works, I want to try taking side by side exposures that complement each other.
I was doing some prop hunting with my art direction teacher this weekend. We visited an extremely run-down junk store. The quiet and almost toothless proprietor took us into a side room and showed us a box full of old cameras. Most of them were broken Polaroids, but down at the bottom was one of these little beauties.
The Olympus Pen-EE was first produced in 1961. It’s a half-frame camera, which means it shoots only half a frame of 35mm film at a time. The man at the junk store let me buy it for eight dollars. considering these types of models seem to be going for between fifty and a hundred dollars on ebay, I got a good deal!
The Pen-EE is one of the earlier automatic exposure cameras. When set on automatic it uses a selenium meter placed in a honeycomb-like array around the lens to decides the aperture. This is what camerapedia.org has to say about selenium meters:
“The electric parts of such a meter are an electromagnetic measuring instrument which is connected to anode and cathode of a selenium photo cell that produces more or less electric power when exposed to more or less light. The optical part of such a meter is a window in front of the photo cell’s light sensitive side. The window’s surface is usually structured like a honeycomb made of convex lenses. This type of window helps to bundle the light coming from the direction to where the photo cell is directed. The mechanical part of a selenium meter is an analog calculator which accepts exposure value and film speed as input parameters for showing the possible aperture/shutter speed combinations for correct exposure.”
I find this all so fascinating! It’s so cool to find almost 50 year old technology that still functions today without batteries. And my new camera definitely still functions. When I set it to auto and try to take a picture in a dark room, it flashes a little orange gel in the viewfinder and it won’t snap a picture. Definitely an outside point-and-shoot. I can’t wait to shoot a roll!
I think I have a minor case of Mr. Toad Syndrome. I’ve been told that symptoms of this disease include a constant changing of pursuits, an incurable obsession with the current pursuit being pursued, and a total rejection of old pursuits in favor of new ones. Luckily, symptom three has yet to strike. Though I do burn through a lot of random hobbies, at least I hold onto to every one I acquire to some degree. My newest pursuit is toy cameras. This website got me hooked.
Toy cameras are generally vintage cameras from the fifties and sixties that are made of plastic. They have plastic lenses, often use medium format film, and come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Just type “toy camera” into an ebay search. You’ll see what I mean. The most loved and adored toy of toy camera users is the Holga, a late bloomer that has tons of awful deficiencies including vignetting and light leaks. All these flaws culminate in a wonderfully distorted, dream-like image that is extremely addicting to shoot and collect. I was considering buying one when a friend offered to give me one of his old “toys.”
Introducing the Six Twenty Sunbeam, an off-brand TLR camera manufactured in Chicago.
Twin Lens Reflex cameras are really neat, both to look at and to use. The smaller bottom lens takes the picture. The larger top lens capture the image aimed at and projects it onto a ground glass on top of the camera. Kind of a primitive LCD screen.
The upside, or downside depending on how you look at it, is that you have to hold the camera below your face and look down to take a picture. I think it’s a blast!
I’m still cleaning up this old and slightly damaged camera. I’ll get some film for it soon and post some pics once I get them developed. Whoo hoo, what an absolutely glorious, scrumtuous way to take photographs! Toot toot!
In the tradition of a generation of bloggers, I will now depart on a long-winded discussion of some of my hobbies.
I love book hunting! There are two thrift stores right off campus and both of them sell softcovers for fifty cents a piece! It’s really the thrill of the hunt that I love the most, digging through dusty piles of outdated computer manuals, crummy romance fiction, and hundreds of worn copies of Clancy, Crichton, Grisham, Ludlum, Koontz, and King. On a shelf of hundreds of books there may only be one I want, but finding it is half the fun!
I went book hunting today and brought back five treasures for two dollars and fifty cents! Brave New World, Howard’s End, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and The Inheritors by William Golding, who also wrote Lord of the Flies. I started reading The Inheritors, which is about cavemen facing new, more human rivals. Definitely against my worldview, but Golding’s portrayal of darkened humanity seeking light is beautiful.
I was to the third chapter at Starbucks, drinking a free drink, when a furious thunder shower hit. I stayed longer than I wanted to, till the storm blew over, then walked to CVS to pick up a battery for my recently acquired $10 camera.
My Suprema has been kind of a pain lately. I like the image it produces, but its tiny and useless LCD screen sucks up all the battery life. The battery died after only a few uses and I discovered at CVS that buying a new one would cost me more than half of what the camera is worth! While I was trying to think of a solution to my dilemma my eyes fell on a little Vivitar mini digital camera the store was selling, the exact model I had years ago that I loved so much. $9, no dumb battery-sucking features, a sturdier design, and it runs ten times longer on a cheap triple A!
I’m sad to say that I purchased it, and that my little blue Suprema is being retired. I miss you already little guy . . . NOT! Here are some test pics I’ve shot already. A little blurrier and more pixelated, but I can live with it.
My Grandpa recently passed away. After the funeral we were looking through shoeboxes full of his old photos and I couldn’t help noticing a response I kept having. I was fascinated by all the photos of people, wether I recognized them or not, but whenever I would come to a pile of nature shots, or vacation photos full of architecture and tourist attractions, I would impatiently flip through them until I encountered more human faces.
My photography teacher stressed this principle to me back in freshman year, but I was still surprised to discover it for myself: human interest is key. No matter how interesting you think a building or an animal or a tree is now, the only pictures that will count in the future will be of people. People are important to us. If we know them in the present, we will be fascinated by their younger selves. If we don’t know them, we will be filled with curiosity: who were they? What were they like. Photos we take of ourselves today will help inform people tomorrow of how we lived.
I was struck by this cultural aspect while looking at old picture of my Grandma’s father and his family who immigrated from Sweden. They were lively and loved sport; the girls played ukuleles, the boys wore their dapper American suits and coats proudly. I never had the chance to meet these descendants of mine, but by looking at their lives in photographic print, I have a connection to them that I would otherwise never have had.
In this digital age we have a great opportunity to capture our lives for the future. Digital cameras give us better quality and greater quantity, but there is now a much greater danger of losing our precious pictures to the ravages of time and constant upgrading technology. As long as we vigilantly watch our hard drives for signs of crashing and always, always copy our digital photos to new and better storage means, we should be fine, but I still think the best way to preserve memories is in a shoebox.
Enjoyed lunch with Kristin and Joy. Had dining common coffee.
Walked down Wade Hampton into Greenville. Flagrant copyright infringement!
The beauties of nature.
The beauties of gas station pump caps.
Walking past the cemetary. I need to smile more.
The King of the Hotdogians!
The Reedy River was a raging rapid!
I found out my camera only takes 24 pics before it runs out of space. Next time I’ll wipe it before I go on an adventure so I’ll have more room.