It has to be said that I probably have far too many cameras.
I have a number of film cameras, in both 35mm and 120 format. I do love my old Pentax SLR. I have a Polaroid camera and several digital cameras. I have vintage cameras, such as a Brownie Box E and a 1970s plastic toy camera. I have a pinhole camera, a 3D stereoscopic camera and a couple of multi-lens film cameras – a 9 lens thing that puts 9 identical images onto the one 35mm frame and a four lens camera that puts four images taken sequentially over a second.
The pride and joy is a Sony full frame DSLR and there are several other point and shoot digitals.
But with all these there is one little camera that I keep coming back to and keep using again and again.
About seven years ago I was on a family holiday in Melbourne. Two days in I went to charge the camera I was using – a little Nikon point and shoot – and realised that I had left the charger for it at home. This meant having six more days of holiday and no camera to use.
But then, in a K-Mart or Big W I saw, for the exhorbitant sum of $15, the Amazing Spiderman Camera! Pretty much as a joke, but also in a “well, why not. It’s a holiday!” mood, I paid my money and grabbed one.
Let me describe the features of this little thing.
First, it is, indeed, little. About the size of a credit card and the thickness of a finger and made from the cheapest of plastic and plastic pretending to be metal. Its lens is, I imagine, cheap plastic and produces a focus so soft it seems to be more of a haze.
The camera operates in two modes – High and Low Resolution. The High Resolution is so low and produces such a range of digital artifacts and pixelations that the Low Resolution remains pretty much for producing abstract blurs.
On High Resolution the camera is capable of holding 26 photos on its internal memory. There is no capacity for additional memory to be added so 26 photos is pretty much your lot. To be fair, the Low Resolution setting allows it to hold 100 photos or, rather, 100 smears. The internal memory only holds data while it’s powered, so if the two AAA batteries go flat before you can transfer your pictures they simply disappear.
To take a photo, you point the camera, look through the viewfinder, press the shutter button and if it goes “click” then you have something. If it doesn’t go “click” then this is the camera’s friendly way of telling you that the conditions are not right for picture taking. And since there are no settings or adjustments possible on the camera then you need to learn to accept what the little thing is telling you and just move on.
Another feature of the camera is its not having a preview screen. If the camera does click, then exactly what you do have remains unknown until you transfer the pictures to your computer. This is especially true since the camera lens and the camera viewfinder have a complex and inexplicable relationship. You look through the viewfinder, frame your composition and, later, when you are looking at the result, you realise that the camera has taken a photo almost, but not quite, what you were expecting. It will be only a part of your picture or more than you expected, or off to the left or, sometimes, just for the hell of it, exactly what you thought you’d taken. The random nature of the viewfinder is, I guess, another feature.
The business of transferring the photos from the camera to your computer is fairly straight forward, though with two provisos. First, the photos can only be moved from the camera using the program that was supplied on a CD when it was bought. This a clunky old Windows program that, I suspect, acts as a dressing up of some DOS programs, but it does get the photos from the camera. (It also offers to put Spiderman stickers on them, but this is a feature I haven’t explored.) Any thought of plugging the camera into a USB port and using Windows to get the photos is not possible. I have experimented with this and Windows simply cannot get inside the camera. It seems that the clunky supplied software is the only option.
About a year ago I bought a new laptop and realised that I wasn’t really sure where the Spiderman CD was. As a result I wasn’t able to use the camera until I opened a drawer and found the software in the “safe place” I had forgotten.
The second point is that the USB cable used to connect the camera is possibly unique. I have never seen another cable of a similar design. The plug that goes into the camera is tiny and oddly shaped and seems to have either been designed especially for the camera or, which seems more likely, is some obscure design from the early days of USB that has been superseded and long forgotten.
Now, with all these drawbacks – poor picture quality, random errors, inconvenient handling – why would I bother. It is, after all, a child’s toy and not much more.
Except that I don’t really think that it is just that. When I look at the pictures it produces, yes, from a technical point of view, they are poor to the point of being unacceptable. Put a big chunk of vintage glass on the front of a 24 megapixel Sony and the photos you’ll produce will make the little Spiderman camera look like finger painting. But that’s only true of you’re looking from a technical point of view.
Look at the photos I’ve included with this article. It’s obvious at a glance that these are not normal photos. But the way that they’re softened and chunked and blurred give them, I think, a sort of painterly quality, almost like impressions rather than accurate representations.
The picture of the cliffs by the beach or the night scene of the light above the windows are not, I think, photos that I could take with any other camera. The picture of the succulent plants growing in the dunes is pixellated to the point of almost becoming an abstract.
I find it continually fascinating to take out this unpredictable little $15 toy and take photos, often in an almost guerilla style and just seeing what I come home with.
If you’d like to see what I’ve come home with I have a Flickr photo stream called “Lo Tech Digital” that you can find here.
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