Camera Follies

An increase in our discretionary funds, however minimal, has gotten us looking for a camera for Corrie. I like to joke and say that I like to take pictures, but she's a photographer. I got her a single-lens reflex film camera years ago, a camera that ultimately didn't survive so many trips through airport security x-ray machines. A single lens reflex camera, otherwise known as an SLR camera, has a view-finder to look through, but a combination of mirrors or a super fancy multi-faceted prism transports the image coming in from the lens directly to the view-finder. It is the only camera apparatus that has a view finder that shows exactly what the lens sees.

Nowadays as film cameras are beginning to wane (mostly) in usage and digital has begun to overtake the market, we started to do research on digital SLRs, or, D-SLRs, and looked at different levels of user interface, programming, and photographic representation. We looked at price as well, and tried to weigh how professional a camera Corrie might want. The eighteen-hundred dollar camera is probably too rich for how much she'd be using it, but the four-fifty one might be too automated for someone who enjoys the control of the fully manual old film cameras.

That is something for camera enthusiasts to think about; the level of manual control available to the user. D-SLRs today are big and bulky, a fact of life for their mechanism of image capture, and with each newer edition, the controls become more and more menu based, but, with each jump up the level and price chain, the ability to set manual controls becomes greater, and it's likely one of these on which we'll settle.

At one point Corrie said something to the effect of "Isn't there just a old school looking body that houses a digital camera, lets the user deal with the light meter and all the other manual controls themselves, and takes great pictures?"

Turns out we found it. It's made by a German camera company called Leica, and the camera is the M-9. If you look it up, you'll see a very beautiful old-school looking camera, and the example pictures are phenomenal. If you know about cameras, then the name Leica means a certain thing. Imagine me saying, "Oh, I found this beautiful car that's exactly as fast as I want and handles even better than I could imagine. It's from a company called Ferrari." Leica holds a spot like that in the camera world.

The price on the M-9 was an Abe Lincoln short of seven-thousand dollars. No shit, $6995 for the body only, and not any of the cool two-grand lenses.

So, that's when we returned to our research on D-SLRs. Later on, feeding off a memory I had of a family reunion in 1990, I decided to look into the company of a camera that my Uncle Henry had that my dad spoke of with hint of genuflection: Hasselblad. The Swedish camera company made many precision instruments in the past, specializing in something called "medium format". Nowadays, they make a medium format digital camera that is a working SLR, but has a mega-pixel count that gets into the 200 range. Primarily used for magazine photo-shoots, these suckers price out at (are you sitting down?) twenty-seven thousand dollars for body only, up to the forties if you want a lens with it.

That's not even a hot tamale, that's a lava flow burning your face off.

In any case, medium format was the first real breakthrough in bringing photography to the common person back in the early 20s. Medium is in contrast to "large" format, which most of us can imagine from old timey movies, with the guy going underneath a sheet behind a big box, saying something like "Now hold still..." Ansel Adams, the famous landscape photographer worked mostly with large format. Medium format gives negatives that tend to be 6cm x 6cm, which is larger than 35mm negatives, which is the main film available today, and produces larger photographs as a result.

Eastman, an innovator in the world of photography and the founder of Kodak, got his shutter mechanism small enough and rolls of light sensitive paper thin enough to fit in a rudimentary box, and home photography was born. Some decades later, the German Leinz and his Leicas did for 35mm what Eastman had done medium format.

While medium format cameras in the digital world inhabit the highest realm of the consumer market, the medium format is making a comeback in the traditional film medium.

Rolls of 120 film are widely available, and the notion of a softer image being out there is appealing to folks who like to take pictures. It'd be nice if there was such a camera...cheap and available to anyone and everyone...you see where I'm going with this?

This has been a long winded essay to say that I bought us a Holga. Holga cameras are the widely available Chinese made medium format film cameras that are so crappily constructed that light filters into the box, slightly exposing the film and "staining" a picture with random colors; vignetting is heavy due to the plastic lens; and you really don't know what you have until you develop the film. You can, though, easily double expose the same negative, and switch the shutter from the normal setting to a position where you hold it open, exposing the film to lots and lots of light, like for starry night shots or sunsets.

The Chinese manufacturers made a few hundred million of them for their burgeoning camera-hungry public, only for 35mm to sweep through all over again. They figured out that the colorful treasures made with Holgas were liked by professionals and amateurs alike, so they re-marketed them to that audience.

These guys are plastic, need no batteries, are super light, funky in having to load the film in the mostly dark bathroom like a cartoon character, and cost less than thirty bucks. I had an Amazon gift card, so I got one and some film, and Corrie's been playing around with it until we make the move on her D-SLR.

Once we get the first roll developed, I'll try to post anything good (we still have two pictures to go).

In the medium format world, I've been looking at the Hawkeye-Brownie Kodak box camera next, which is cheaper but constructed better, just not made anymore. I also found a working folding camera, you know, like an accordion, an Iskra...I only mention it because I cracked up when I found out that the only company that regularly makes the film needed for it is Croatian.