Update on the instant camera

I thought it might be the perfect camera for social occasions; not that we get many of those these days. And it really is. Show it to the kids, take a picture and print it, then show them the buttons to use and let go. For anyone wincing at the cost of Instax (£15 for ten shots?), this works out at two prints to the penny. Sure, the prints are high contrast and low detail, but the fridge soon gets covered in them.

The added joy is that you also have a digital file, so you can make multiple prints or even print them in colour. Three images will fit on a single 100*150mm sheet of paper. The image quality, especially in the dark, is as rough as a badger’s arse if you pixel-peep but still perfectly acceptable at the normal print size of 83 by 48mm. Despite my moaning, it copes pretty well with low light so it’s great for sociable evenings under house lighting. The mono prints from the camera will only show highlights, but the digital files can be printed later in colour and hold much more detail.

I also like that the prints are wide and thin. I’ve written before about the fun of cropping to a 5:2 format to fit onto Moo business cards. These prints are about 7:4 so not as letterbox as the Moo cards but wider than normal.

Down sides? Squeeze it in a bag and you can turn it on and eventually drain the battery. So carry it on its strap and put up with the odd looks. Tear the prints off downward or risk a rough tear. Perhaps the strap is a bit short if you are bigger than a child. It won’t print while it’s charging. And that’s it.

This is definitely my party with friends camera. Not that I can do that presently. But when I get the chance again, it will be out with the bear-cam and cover the fridge with daft pictures.

My wife, who bought me the camera, was worried that I would think it was a gimmick and not use it. Instead, I love it (and my wife, obviously). It’s done two small bubble gatherings since June and it’s a hit. If I pulled out a normal camera I’d be shouted at to put it away and join in. The bear-cam gets passed around and we all take daft pictures of each other and then laugh some more in the morning.

Recommended for post-apocalypse parties.

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The Konstruktor challenge

“It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer” – that’s what we’re told. Or, if you use cheap old kit like me, it’s what we hope.

You’ve probably heard of the Sunny 16 cheap shots challenge or the Frugal Film Project (if not, you should). But here’s a different approach: what is the worst and least functional combination you can put together?

Why? Because it’s a challenge. How bad can it get before you really can’t take an interesting picture? Besides, we know that constraints increase creativity. And I should point out that I’m not doing this to say I’m a great photographer: I’m doing it because I’m bored with lockdown.

So what’s the deal? First, my worst or least useable camera. It was going to be an ancient Leidox that takes 127 film that I was going to try a roll of 35mm in. But it has several shutter speeds and apertures so that felt a bit like cheating. Then I remembered I have a Lomo Konstruktor. A fuzzy lens set at f10 on a plastic body offering 1/80 or B for shutter speeds. Hopeless focusing accuracy and dodgy film advance. Just what the masochist ordered.

For film I’ve got some positive copy stock that was meant for making contact prints from negatives. It’s probably got a negative ISO and was developed in paper developer under safelight (so it’s orthochromatic). It can do mid tones, but it needs careful development. Oh, and it is also very expired. I may have to shoot a few frames first with an adjustable camera to work out what to rate it at and how to develop it.

<Brief interlude – ISO 12 seems to work in Rodinal 1+25 for seven minutes. >

Then finally, what subject matter or conditions? It has got to be low light or night, hasn’t it? Mainly because ISO12 in a camera that’s fixed at f10 and 1/80 would need the light to be about a stop brighter than clear sunshine. So if I can’t do that, then I can hold the shutter open on B, which means at least a second so that I can count it. Or I could fire the shutter more than once and build up the exposure that way.

Fire the shutter multiple times to build-up the exposure.

Sat here reading a book during the evening I did a quick check and the light is EV3 at ISO12. That’s about fifteen seconds at F10, before any reciprocity. I’m going to need that B setting. My clever book of knowledge says that city streets at night are around the same light level.

That plastic lens flares a bit

The Konstruktor is also pretty awful at winding on, so I will be loading it with a short roll of around 24 exposures.

The die is cast. I would prefer the pie is vast, but the challenge is to cope with what I’ve got. What could possibly go wrong? Onward we march!

Night shot – the only things that made it to the negative were the car headlights and a street lamp.

What did this prove, then? Nothing. But it was fun to push the limits of difficult. The Konstruktor is not an easy camera to use and ISO 12 ortho film is a bit limiting. But I was delighted to get some images and I will never again complain that my camera is awkward.

Fancy a go? It’s the kind of thing you could do with a chum by post: each assemble an awful combination of parts, swap them and see what you can do. And you may worry less in future that you don’t have the newest and best kit. Or you might start a new photographic movement.

Minimalism

I should have known. I would have known if I’d thought about it. Just as there is Rule 34 for the internet, so in photography: if you can think of it, there’s a movement and special interest group for it.

I was surprised to learn that there was a minimalist photography competition. Then I was surprised that I was surprised, as I said.

Not that it’s a bad thing – quite the opposite. I like the Zen balance of the fewest number of elements or the counterpoint of simple shapes. I’ve heard the idea that you should dress-up to go out and then at the door remove one item. Minimalism is, to me, the removal of all but the essential (don’t try to picture me going out in just my underpants).

So I went and had a look at the minimalist photography awards. As you would expect, a mixed bag. Some is very good indeed while some is either too busy or just not very good. The way the competition is organised is interesting though and appears to be self funding. You pay to enter, the winners get cash prizes, probably covered by the entry fees, and get to download and print their own winning certificate. I may be totally wrong, but it has a sense of the vanity publishing industry for writers (give us money and we will print your book). I’m sure I must be wrong – the awards are backed by a magazine and the winners did get some press coverage.

Photography, like publishing, probably has a strong power law for the distribution of income: a few people make a lot and a lot make very little. There is a difference in the work involved though. Writing a book might take you a year, so it requires serious effort and commitment. Taking a picture is effectively free. This is why I hear of professional photographers being undercut by anyone with a camera and why people are asked to do work in return for ‘exposure’.

It used to be that book publishing was such an investment that there was strong filtering: a publisher would invest in a known quantity like a successful author but needed to be pretty certain before betting on a new one (hence the power law of income). The vanity publishing industry catered for the people who wanted to be published and were prepared to pay to obtain a box of books they could give to friends. And then along came print on demand. Now I can put my masterpiece online and give people a link to print their own copy. On the whole it costs less for the prospective author and probably sells as many copies. (I do know whereof I speak: I self-published a book that was later taken-up by a publisher, but that was due more to chutzpah than talent.)

What’s the photography equivalent? I suppose there are places like Instagram where you can effectively publish for free and places like Etsy where you can sell prints. Then there are ‘zines (who wants to even think maga in these times?). Most of these seem to be small-run, quirky, and are given away or sold for little more than cost (go read Charles Stross or Cory Doctorow about the margins and money streams in mainstream publishing). Small-scale guerilla publishing of pictures or words are marvellous and not to be dismissed. Just don’t expect to be Barbara Cartland. And I have no idea who the photographic equivalent of our Babs would be – Ansel Adams?

So why am I on my soapbox? I like minimalist pictures very much. I like a lot of the award winning pictures in this competition. Paying a fee to enter a competition may set a useful barrier to the less serious or committed (see above for the zero marginal cost of one photo) and it may build to a prize fund worth having. The winners probably got what they wanted and we’re all happy. So let me wind-in whatever neck I had extended and take the whole thing at face value. The correct judgement to use here is Occam’s razor, not Hanlon’s.

Go and look at the gallery of minimalist images and see what you think.

Update on shooting IR

Having converted a Panasonic camera to shoot infrared and built a little push-on hood to hold the special filter, I had second thoughts. Part of it was looking at the work of Pierre-Louis Ferrer on Petapixel and his own website. Obviously, I’m not that good, but I liked what he was doing.

I realised that I normally use mono film, so what was my reason for not putting the IR filter directly in front of the sensor? Besides, fitting the filter inside the camera did away with the fiddly lens hood.

I also had a close look at Ferrer’s work and I think he is using a luminosity mask to do split toning. He is applying a pale khaki tone to the highlights and possibly a touch of blue to the shadows.

So for my next trick I found a useful YouTube video on creating luminosity masks in Photoshop Elements (as I’m too cheap to spring for the full version, and it does all I could want). The basic idea is to create a mask that controls where an effect works, based on the brightness of the image. So you can do something like tone the highlights a delicate shade without changing the mid-tones or shadows.

On my first attempts I realised that the highlights in my IR images were totally blown out. Back to the camera and play with the settings. IR mono scenes are very high contrast and the camera was not holding the highlights. Since I actually want the shadows to go black, I set the camera to underexpose by one stop.

Lower lake, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

I had a chance to go out for a walk in sunshine (I felt like a battery-hen on day release), so I took the remodified camera. With a dog lead round one wrist I was very glad to not be fiddling with the filter.

First go with luminosity masking

So the update is that I’ve fiddled with and adjusted the camera and learned a new technique.

Not bad for a day out.

Sony Cybershot T77 – the new Pen?

I’ve written about the joys of using an Olympus Pen for film photography, in particular its small size and light weight.

Now here is my digital equivalent, and it’s smaller, lighter and smarter.

The DSC-T77, as it likes to be known, is a tiny little digital camera that folds a zoom lens inside the body. There is nothing to pop out so it doesn’t change shape when zooming. The camera uses a drop-down sliding cover, so one flick of a finger fires it up. Or it would, if it wasn’t so shiny. Until I put some Sugru on this baby it was like handling a thin bar of soap.

Sony made a whole range of these, including waterproof versions.

The camera is genuinely tiny – just 94mm wide, 57 tall and 15 thick. I can hide it in my hand. In the package you get a 10 MP sensor and a zoom equivalent to 35-140. The down side to this is that the on-screen menus need a fine finger to fettle them. Sony provide a little plastic pointer on the wrist strap, so this serves in place of my stump of a fat digit.

It comfortably fits into a pocket and doesn’t even spoil the line of a suit. I’ve got an old wallet for a Blackberry that’s a perfect fit as a case.

The very small size and a useful macro capability make this camera good for pictures too small to get a different camera, or any camera plus your head, into. I’ve taken shots from inside a bunch of flowers, for example. The closest macro distance is 8cm.

The downside of the small size is a small battery. The camera seems to use the battery even when it is shut down – probably to maintain its settings and allow the quick start-up. I bought a second battery for it, so I’m in the habit of swapping-in the fresh battery before I take the camera out. The first start-up after a battery swap always takes longer, but thereafter it’s quick. Much quicker than my waterproof Fuji one, for example. Even so, if I was taking the Sony away for a weekend I would take both batteries.

It uses Sony’s memory stick duo storage card, but that’s no great problem as my card reader takes them. Plus it’s a snapshot camera. You put a card in, clear the old photos off as you go and never bother with a second card.

The lens and pictures are capable. I’d like to tell you how I’ve shot pictures of brick walls to measure the resolution and aberations, but that’s not what the camera is for and I can’t be arsed. This is a tiny little, easy to carry, quick to use, snapshot camera. The zoom lens is handy, particularly as it doesn’t trombone out of the front of the camera. The widest aperture runs from f3.5 to 4.6, which isn’t too bad since you can push the ISO to 3200 if you really need to. There is a tiny flash which is really only useful close up but does offer slow sync.

It also does face detection and various focus and exposure modes. What’s not to like? Granted, it’s small and fiddly. Since the camera body is so smooth, there are no dials and everything is driven by menus. This can be a pain trying to find things, so I tend to set the camera up the way I like it and then leave it alone. I would only tweak it if I was going into a known different situation – people running about or dark backgrounds, for example.

People sit under it to each their packed lunch.

So this really does fit with the idea behind the original Pen, in being an image note-taker. The zoom lens makes it more useful than a mobile phone camera and the quick start-up means that it is not less handy. It’s also smaller than my mobile phone.

A troll, caught by sunrise and turned to stone.

Let’s hear it for the snappy Sony!