As an amateur/hobbyist street photographer, there's another angle to using old/unusual cameras like digicams, Kodak instant cameras, etc:
It's adds to your credibility and reduces how threatening you appear when you snap a photo of someone in public. If you're using your phone, the subject's assumption will be that they are about to be plastered all over your social media. If you use a huge DSLR, you come across as creepy.
If you're using something odd, unusual, uncommon, like a film rangefinder camera or digicam, it's much more clear that your intentions are not evil, and that you simply really like photography. I've had curious people ask me about my camera after they notice me take a shot of them, which would never happen if I had used my phone.
Your mileage may vary, I have an anecdote to tell.
About a decade ago, I went to North Wales for vacation and obtained a 70's Soviet camera in pristine condition (Zorki-4K) at a car boot sale, along with the original case and strap.
A couple days later, it came to my attention there was a carnival nearby. And, frankly, I'm not sure if "carnival" is what it's called, but they had a Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, stuffy prizes, that kind of thing.
All I had with me was my Zorki and a couple rolls of b&w 35mm film. By the time I got there, it was dark, I had to push the exposure quite a bit, and I was so focused in trying to understand the gear I had, a couple of local policemen came to me and start asking why I was taking pictures.
Even after hearing my thick accent, seeing my vintage camera, examining my Russian passport, they weren't satisfied and wasted almost half an hour of my time checking some sex offender database for my name.
I didn't even bother to process the roll, none of those pictures had enough light.
In a time before I had any awareness of international security concerns, I was taking photographs of an airport and the planes taking off from an adjacent abandoned industrial lot. To my surprise, the federal police showed up and ask what I was up to. Turns out explaining that you're taking pictures of something because it looks cool is not going to cut it, I guess it's shallow enough of a reason for it to be suspicious. They asked to see my photographs, because it was all sunset silhouettes I think they were satisfied I wasn't trying to gather intel on the airport and they went on their merry way.
This is why I love micro 4/3 so much. You can get some truly tiny, forgettable/retro-looking interchangeable lens systems that will take amazing photos.
Bah, I miss it. It should've been so much more. I bought my first 4/3 in 2012... but my interest faded. Flash forward a decade and I bought my first full frame last year. The new Canon RF lineup has some great potential, but damn I would've loved it all in a smaller package.
>If you use a huge DSLR, you come across as creepy.
I think that's mostly true for those who rely on telephoto lenses --which have a use, but for street photography suck because they flatten things out.
If you want good street photography photos most [d/SLR shooters] will use 35 to 50mm lenses. There are outliers but for most of the "candids" that is the usual range. With these people don't come across as any creepier than a photographer using any other equipment.
Personally I quite like 100-135mm for street photography. You still need to get close to your subject, though, and I don't use random people as the dominant subject of my photos.
The thing with cameras, is that there is a spectrum. If your camera is small, it's fine. If your camera is very large, it's mostly fine. It's when it's between the two that there's a bigger issue.
this is true - I was at a street fair a couple years ago with an old Graflex 4x5 camera, just walking around. People came up to me asking to have their pictures taken. This in a town where most except the crazies keep to themselves. It was surreal.
There's really not much out there, because the chemistry of instant film is very difficult and without the film, there are no cameras. Fuji's only real competitor is The Impossible Project, now known as Polaroid, having bought the name. Their cameras are very nice, but their film is more expensive and technically inferior (though not necessarily aesthetically inferior, depending on your goals.) You can also buy film from them that is compatible with classic Polaroid cameras.
Polaroid has always been worse than Fuji from a technical aspect, but that's always been part of the draw, I feel. It's why Instagram got popular in the first place as the filters mimicked the colors of a washed-out Polaroid still from various decades.
The CP1300 is very awkward with its tray. The QX10 has no protruding tray, comes with a battery standard and the prints can be used as stickers. Otherwise the Fuji Instax line is pretty nice as well.
I don’t know about prosumers, but I have a Selphy CP1300 for mobile printing. Its 300 dpi dye sublimation CYM is good enough for me.
It accepts SD cards and USB so it works with or without a post processing workflow. Or my phone via WiFi.
At retail, 4x6 output is about $0.30. That’s larger and cheaper than the instant film based systems. It is a price point where I don’t hesitate to print…my Canon inkjet runs about $0.15 per 4x6 at retail with media and ink…there’s no separate ink cost with the Selphy CP series.
Canon has been making the CP dye-sublimation printers for a long time. It is a solid system. The models just get more features over time. Aftermarket batteries are available (that’s what I have).
Finally, printing is not really in the middle of the prosumer wheelhouse these days. The CP is probably as good as you will do. Dye sublimation printers can travel well. Inkjets and lasers tend not to.
Perhaps you caught this news story, but Epson very recently found 30 brand new unsold R-D1s and planned to distribute them somehow. Could be your chance! I suspect these are pretty collectable now, especially having used the Leica M mount.
One of the strangest things on that camera is it has a physical analogue gauge to display how much free space the memory card has, like the fuel level in an old car.
I have noticed that there has been a kind of resurgence in older digital cameras that used ccd sensors and different sensor filters compared to contemporary models. A lot of people feel like new cameras now are almost clinical in how they take pictures and because of that they lack personality that older, quirkier cameras had, a similar argument to why some vintage glass is desirable despite being technically inferior to what you can get now.
I have heard those complaints from a few--though not a lot of--people, but coming more from a video background that has always struck me as not really understanding how color works, either up front with aesthetic setting or on the back end with color grading.
And if you don't want to get into grading, Fuji loads up their cameras with film stock analogues that can give you all the quirk you ever wanted.
I've heard that argument from people before. I love that the stock images from my nikon z5 are fairly clinical. its the best starting point for when I load them up into dx0 photolab and start adjusting all the variables/adding film simulations.
What I love is that I can get a nice SHARP, low distortion rendering. You can't fix that in post.
There's definitely a difference in the way CMOS and CCD sensors render colors. CMOS does not do well with highlights. C-41 process negative film is still the gold standard as far as dynamic range goes, but CCDs and non-Bayer CMOS sensors like the Foveon come far closer than modern Bayer CMOS sensors. They also tend to look warmer than modern CMOS images, especially older Sony sensors from the late 2000s. Comparing the RAW output from one of my older Sony Alpha DSLRs vs a Canon 6D from a few years ago it's definitely noticeable.
How do you compare the RAW data? If you're just loading up images in your editor then the editor is probably applying a camera specific profile that modifies colors and curve among other things. Color rendering depends on the lens too somewhat IIRC.
You're correct in that the demosaicing algorithms have a huge impact on image quality as well, I'm just comparing the finished result of whatever Lightroom spits out at me. It's entirely possible the camera profiles are affecting image quality but if you assume everything else is the same then I've generally found better highlight recovery on CCDs than CMOS sensors. Totally anecdotal, I know, but there's a decent bit of agreement on photography forums as well (I know how superstitious and subjective photographers tend to be, so take this all with a grain of salt.)
I find the color rendering of my 5D and 1Ds3 (2005 and 2007 designs) to be slightly, but noticeably, different from new cameras.
One quantitative difference is that there's less green sensitivity in the blue raw channel than modern sensors, which hurts their noise performance in warm lighting conditions.
I'm not sure exactly how that affects color rendering in terms of metamerism, but it is visible in my experience.
For just a moment I thought you were advising carrying an Epson scanner, with a power brick + battery, and pointing at the world, and scanning it. (Like people who use iPads for photography.)
Phone cameras are really good in daylight and getting better in low light, but there's one thing they'll never have and that's a decent flash. It doesn't matter whether Xenon flashtube or LED, to get real flash you need a real flash capacitor, and that's just not a priority in a slim smartphone.
Bonus if your old-school digicam also has a front element over half an inch in diameter and zooms to 10x. That still gives a satisfying "real camera" feel. I have a Panasonic ZS3 that I still use quite a bit for vacation snaps, and one of these days I hope to (inexpensively) snap up a Canon G series.
This is the main reason I bring a film point-and-shoot to parties and social events: people look way better with a “real” flash than they do with a phone flash. That and the dynamic range of film are still unsurpassed by just about anything in phone form.
As a (very) amateur photographer, this doesn’t make sense to me. Flashes indoors always look terrible in my experience, and modern smartphones are great in low light.
Modern smartphones perform very admirably in low light, but with some undesirable (IMO) tradeoffs: you get all kinds of weird artifacts from extrapolation, and the overall image frequently looks muddy compared to a low-light capture on a DSLR or mirrorless camera (which tend to look noisy instead). I do, however, regularly make those tradeoffs when I don't want to bug people with a flash or haul a full camera body to a show, though!
I think my use of flash indoors amounts to an aesthetic preference: I like the way skin tones come out on the combination of a ludicrous P&S flash and a "cheap" color stock like Gold 200. The tradeoff is glare and red-eye, both of which can be compensated for during compensation or with editing after the fact.
Using flash on color negative film is a very different experience from digital. Xenon flashes do really well with film, and don't blow out highlights like digital, giving a smooth rolloff that's very pleasing to the eye.
> modern smartphones are great in low light.
This is only true if you only view images on a smartphone. Blow them up on a 23 inch or larger monitor and you'll notice tons of digital NR, artifacting, and other fuckery where the image processing algorithms have tried to recover detail and not really done so all that well.
Of course you could do something like turn your phone's flash down to the lowest setting, put a filter over it and use it to trigger an off camera flash. Something like an old Nikon SB-800 in SU-4 mode.
You could even hold the SB-800 in one hand and the phone in the other, sort of Bruce Gilden style. (dear gods what am I suggesting...)
Personally I love an X100 and its leaf shutter. My fav old digital camera.
I get this. I'm a big fan of Straight Out of Camera photography for the same reason. i.e. just use JPEGs rather than RAW files.
If you need RAW, use it obviously. To fix white balance or exposure later for example.
Letting the camera render your JPEGs though has the pleasing quality of being limited by the processing of camera model at the time you took the image.
Now that may not give you the "best" results but it will give you a certain look that's tied to the time you took the photo. A bit like using film that's not available any more.
You get the best of both world, the interpretation of the camera and the possibility to render your own if the camera messed up. It's a lot easier after a trip to just delete all the raw images than to try to fix the white balance of a jpg.
When I started photography a decade ago, I tried to optimise by using Raw when I thought I could get a benefit (eg. night photography) and jpg for the rest. Now storage is cheap/fast enough that the impact is negligible and it can save you when the camera or you (manual mode ftw) mess up the exposure.
> I'm a big fan of Straight Out of Camera photography for the same reason. i.e. just use JPEGs rather than RAW files.
Same here. I bought a Fujifilm xe2 few years back and it is one of the best purchases I made. Gives excellent JPEGs straight out of the camera without needing all that RAW post-processing.
On my Canon 60D my jpegs seem to come out looking noticeably blue while my raws look pretty normal. I save in both formats for each pic, so I see the side-by-side constantly.
I got some of my favorite photos from a $20 digital camera. I had spent thousands on various early cameras and decided to go to the lowest quality tool in order to improve other aspects of my photography, such as lighting and composition. It’s low cost also let me put the camera in positions I wouldn’t let my expensive cameras near (mud, water, traffic, etc).
When the camera stopped working, I hard wired an external battery pack on it, but it was never the same with the modifications.
Unfortunately, I had the photos stored on the Photo Bucket service and they decided to dump old photos of free users. Yeah, I know better, but I didn’t realize how important the images would become.
I miss my Sony DSC U20 from 2004 or so. The focusing was really good for some reason - you could just point it randomly, press the button and it would instantly take a well focused picture unlike modern phone cameras that tend to wait a few seconds and then get it wrong. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-Cybershot-DSC-U-Digital-Camera...). They weren't very long lived though - most seemed to pack up in a few years.
That camera (and a lot of similar cameras from around then) is fixed focus, so there's no focus delay, but you also can't adjust the focus either. With a fixed focus camera usually everything farther away than X is going to show up in focus (or nearly so) and anything closer isn't going to be in focus. But a lot of the time, you will be at least X away to frame your shot anyway, so no big deal.
Whoops, somebody put wrong info on the US amazon page[1] I had skimmed.
"The DSC-U20 offers a fixed-focus 5mm f2.8 lens"
Of course if I had read a bit more, it does mention autofocus in the next sentence. So anyway, that's not why it's fast then. Sorry for the misdirection.
I'm considering getting a decent camera, or even going back to my old Iphone honestly. The images it took were so much more photorealistic than my current Iphone. It's like modern Iphones oversaturate everything and add trashy these unrealistic colors to things like the sky. I've tried to capture beautiful sunsets, but even by adjusting exposure I still cannot nail what was once so easy to get.
I even wonder sometimes if is using some kind of algo adding colors based on what it thinks things should look like? Don't know enough about this stuff.
Because a tiny sensor could only do so much due to those pesky laws of physics, the latest trend in mobile camera tech is so-called "computational photography", where they use a shitload of algorithms and AI to enhance your pictures. And I think they do segment them somewhat to apply these "enhancements" selectively?
Anyway, no idea about iOS, but many Android phones are capable of capturing raw pictures that you could then process however you wish in Lightroom or whatever else you prefer.
It sounds like you're describing HDR (high dynamic range), which your iphone uses by default when image contrast reaches some threshold. The effects can be unwanted, to say the least. Have you tried disabling it?
After seeing some of my party photos from 15 years ago on Facebook I got nostalgic for the excessive flash type photos that the digital pocket cameras of that era took. Picked up a Canon Ixus (3 Megapixal) for 10 Euros and have been having a lot of fun with it.
This article makes me want to buy something even older.
Not just Japan, it's the new take on filters for the cool kids in Asia. China/Philippines/Indonesia - look at their local market places for camcorders and digi cameras and even film too an extent. More Instax, but even regular film devlopment and such.
Why does this website require a database connection to render a static site? This trend infuriates me, and PHP developers are the worst offenders. So many PHP sites can be static assets but no, for some reason they use MySQL. Grinds my gears.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
So many sites run wordpress cause it's easy. Wordpress doesn't cache by default unless you run on one of the major hosts like kinsta or wp engine. Wordpress needs MySQL. Can you really fault them for picking out a standard CMS instead of rolling a static site that requires someone to be slightly technical.
