In a recent post I showed some product pictures I made for eBay. One of the cameras was the Range 2000 focus free point’n’shoot:
Last week I tried it. Man, what a camera. Completely made of the cheapest plastic and there is literally nothing you can control.
Aperture – fixed. Shutter time – fixed. Focus -fixed. Focal length – fixed.
The only thing you can do is choose the frame and press the shutter button. It’s a real challenge to take photos with this, being used to the gazillion options my Nikon D300s offers.
I used Agfa APX 100 b/w film (that’s a standard 35 mm film) and developed the film myself. After the disappointing experiences in the Absolut Analog workshop (which were due to an unfortunate chain of events, see older post) it was the first time I developed film by myself. And it worked !
All pictures were scanned using a CanoScan 9000F scanner, then the pictures have been imported and corrected in Lightroom. The more persistent dust particles have been retouched using Photoshop CS3.
The vignette effect is not artificial. The Camera makes this by itself.
Light spill (bright stripe on the left side). I do not know where it comes from exactly. The light seals _look_ ok on the camera. Perhaps also a mistake made when I loaded the film. You stick the narrow end of the film through a slit in the spool, and when too much of the film end pokes through the other side of the slit it might occur that this additional material presses against the lid when transporting the film… er….anyone who understood this theory raise hands. Never mind.
Light spill…
Light spill. Graffiti on a wall… somebody with the initials T.K. seems to love ice-cream.
What a pity that this picture has light spill and is unsharp. The words mean (top to bottom) “Fear Love Sorrow Joy”
Black and white pictures of statues always look so dramatic, don’t you think ?
Metal ornaments on a church door. This heavy vignette is also camera-made.
Conclusion: I enjoyed walking around and using this very primitive camera. When you don’t have to think about technical details you concentrate on the subject. Framing, angle, composition. It’s a really good to go back to the roots and train what is really about photography – composing good pictures.
I bet pictures taken with the crappiest digital camera you can find won’t look that interesting (assuming that the Range 2000 is a pretty crappy camera). So, what is it that analog adds to the photos that makes them more interesting? Perhaps all those imperfections digital cameras try to avoid. Or is it that analog imperfections just look better than digital imperfections? Nevertheless I especially like the second picture and the last two.