Low-Fi-Tography
Posted on Tue Mar 4, 12:29 AM in Picture This
My first foray in the photography in many years starts with… a really old film camera.
My saxophone professor always said that you couldn’t improvise on a tune until you could play it straight, backwards, forwards, inverted, etc. Only after you understood the tune in all its simplicity, melody and harmony and rhythm combined, could you know how to spin off of the main road into the wilds of your own creativity. While I certainly didn’t pursue jazz performance, I did agree with the theory. It’s difficult to know what you are doing with another’s work until you appreciate it in the form it was presented to you.
Photography is like that to me. I have always learned in what I call a pyramid style, which builds upon basic notions before traveling upward to concepts supported by those notions. If pressed, I could jump into the middle layer of any subject and pick it up, but I know that I wouldn’t really learn it unless I knew the whys and hows of the layers below. Point-and-shoot cameras are great for quick dissemination of information, and people can get great images from them. But I never felt comfortable with the one we had, partially because I never learned how it worked. I didn’t have to—it did the work for me.
I was thinking in this vein when I decided that my assault on learning photography was going to involve two fronts: hi-fi and low-fi. And low-fi was going to be a vintage toy camera (many of which are coming back into vogue again, thanks to an appreciation for vignetting and other “imperfections” achievable on film) called the Felica. My eBay purchase was actually for the British-marketed version, the “Bunny.” A really simple design, it involves: a lens that can be rotated for zone focussing with distances marked off in feet around the lens (4ft-9ft, 9ft-25ft and 25ft to infinity); three shutter speeds (B [for flash], 1/25th and 1/50th); two apertures (“sunny” and “cloudy”); a yellow filter option for b&w film; an optical viewfinder (no immediate feedback here, folks); and the film advance winder. It produces 6×6cm exposures on 120 film, so that means a mere 12 exposures per roll. And if I’m lucky, I can find a real film developer who’s willing to cross-process some of my color rolls.
No doubt that in my learning the original tune of photography there will be some “guesswork” rolls, but I am anxious to play around with this toy. And to anyone that might not be aware of the neat things that can be done with low-fi cameras and film, check out the Flickr “Felica” pool here.
This is a Vredeborch Felica 120 camera, called the "Bunny" in Britain. It was made probably 50 years ago. I won this on eBay recently. My plan is to approach photography from two sides: hi-fi and low-fi. Obviously on the "low-fi" end, this camera is pretty simple. There is going to be a lot of "guess work" film rolls, I assume...
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And then you said...
# redchuck wrote on Tue Mar 4 at 01:52 PM:
I have several antique cameras if you have any use for them.
# Gail wrote on Tue Mar 4 at 03:06 PM:
If you want to learn photograpy, you need to get some time in the dark room and do your own developing. I learned so much about taking pictures in Doughman’s classes spent about a year in that dark room.