The Plastic Lens ~ Words » new

Pinhole Day and a Quick 1st impression of Harinezumi

Cameron — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:20:40 +0000

Pears WPPD 09

This years Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (last Sunday) was less than optimal (for me) for a lot of reasons. The weather was shocking, we had power failures, my computer froze when the power finally came back on and I was suffering from the jet-lag feeling that comes from just finishing night shift and having to adjust your body clock through a 12 hour 180º shift within a day…
Apart from those factors, I had fun and actually managed to grab a few pinhole exposures that I thought were not too bad (not brilliant either however). My two cameras of choice this year were my converted Polaroid EE66 with Polaroid 125i pack film and my Holgamods Pinholga using type 84 packfilm. I started the day with little coffee cups and ended (as I seem to do) in the kitchen with some fruit…

I‘m having a lot (A LOT) of fun with the Digital Harinezumi.

Harinezumi by Harinezumi

This probably has a lot to do with how much it reminds me of using an analogue toy camera. When in still capture mode, you do not get a LCD viewfinder mode, you have to estimate what you are capturing (and anyone who uses toy cameras will know that their viewfinders are less than accurate) You also have the option of turning off the review mode of the camera so that you won’t know what you have got until you download the images to your computer (so I suppose that’s the digital equivalent of waiting to get your film developed).
In movie mode, they’re is no audio as such, there is a bit of white noise. I think it may have been fun if they had the option of the whirr of an old 8mm camera sound as well as the movies generated by the camera remind me of those and the results look very analogue, like some old family home movies from the 1960′s.

Macro Toes by Harinezumi

The colours are kick-ass funky and similar to some sort of weird cross processing type of thing going on…
As you can see from some of my initial test images, the macro function (two choices of focus here macro or normal) works very well. There is nice grain in lower lighting conditions, feeling more reminiscent to me of film grain than ‘digital’ grain. I could go on and probably will, when I do an ‘out of the box’ video review of this little electric hedgehog later on this week, but I remain impressed with what Powershovel & Superheadz have come up with.

December

Cameron — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:27:09 +0000

ell, today is the first day of the last month of the calendar year. It’s been a busy year here at theplasticlens, with one exhibition, developing B&W film for the first time in donkey’s years and let’s not forget the arrival of the new blackbird,fly camera from Superheadz/Powershovel in Japan.
In other exciting happenings I took the family to the Northern Territory and we drove from Central Australia to Darwin at the top end, taking many photos as we went. Also, one of my Polaroids will be used as cover art for a published book (more details when it is actually published).
But we still have 30 more days for the year I hear you say – what else can we expect? Well, the mad holiday season of course BUT! also – new blackbird,fly colours are to be released for all you bbf fans out there. That’s right! Apparently there will be a release of white and red versions of the bbf. You may remember that on the initial release of the blackbird,fly in Tokyo there were a limited number of alternative colours to the black, orange and blue versions released. These were yellow, brown and white. It looks like Superheadz are looking to expand the regular colour range, including the previously rare white, but adding red as well. This is all good news because it must mean that the interest in (and purchases of) the bbf is high enough to warrant a new production batch with new choices. I’m very happy about this because the Powershovel/Superheadz people deserve success with this refreshingly new approach to the toy camera field (and they’re really nice people too, which makes the success and ongoing developments with the camera even sweeter)
I will keep you posted with news as soon as more information comes to hand.

BBF – the teaser movie

Cameron — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:45:05 +0000

Below is a ‘teaser‘ video of a great new plastic camera that is in development by the company Powershovel, in Japan. I have mentioned Powershovel on this blog before, they are the driving force behind many great artistic projects that involve music, books and photography and behind the company Superheadz Ina Babylon who market all kinds of cool cameras that use film and often alternative formats.
Powershovel sent me a test camera of theirs under development called the BBF (initially it was going to be called the ‘blackbird, fly’ but a company representative tells me it has decided to market it as the BBF now) As seen in this post the camera is a plastic TLR (twin lens reflex) that will be capable of taking different format exposures on 35mm film. As far as I know this is the first ‘toy camera’ TLR that is exclusively designed to take 35mm film and it will also have the option to use two different masks in the camera, the sizes of these masks will be 24×36 and 24×24. The test camera I was supplied with had the 24 x 36 mask which is removable so you can actually get exposures to the edge of the film complete with sprocket holes!
Anyway on to the ‘teaser’ of the camera as well as a few example photos I shot with it at the end. Apologies for the low fi video quality. The video itself shows that the camera has ‘N’ & ‘B’ shutter selection, a hotshoe (which works as expected) and two aperture settings (sunny/cloudy). Also illustrated is the waist level head-down viewfinder familiar to any one who has used Twin Reflex Cameras like the Lubitel, Yashica, Seagull etc. Different framing lines are obvious for the different masking options I presume.
This was a fun camera to try out and I was sorry when I sent it back, I wanted to ‘play’ with it more, but time was a factor. Remember the BBF is not available yet and is still under development, so the final product may be slightly different with different features. I am led to believe it should be released in August or September 2008.
The lovely background music for the video is a piece called ‘Soup’ by a Powershovel musician, Ken Takehisa and is available on the release ‘Lost Films Vol 1″ from the Powershovel site powershovel audio

BBF a new camera from Powershovel/Superheadz from artpunk on Vimeo.