I’m interested in the effect cameras and processes have on the way I see and interact with the world. I fell in love with large format not for the quality but for the way it made me slow down, think and really look, ‘Making’ not ‘taking’ a photograph.
I maintain I’m not a camera collector, despite using everything from a 8x11mm Minox through to 20”x24” mammoth plate. Each makes me think and work differently. Often I’ll choose the camera to suit the picture planned but sometimes it’s interesting and rewarding to see where a particular photography method takes you.
To that end, I bought a children’s instant-print camera. For £20 I got a really crappy digital camera, five rolls of thermal paper (the type used for till receipt rolls) and even some tiny felt pens to colour my pictures. What could I do with such a lo-fi device?
It does have a couple of things going for it: The prints have a very distinctive look, particularly when using the ‘dot mode’ setting which gives a dithered 1-bit effect. The instant prints (the camera spits them out of the front after shooting, Polaroid style) are a physical object to be viewed and handled unlike the screen’s promise of a picture later. Lastly the prints are very cheap: literally only a penny or less to make.
The camera.
(I’m pretty sure Kaishengyuan is Chinese for ‘Hasselblad’ :-) It comes in this mauve/yellow colour scheme or a pink version. I suspect the insides are very similar on whichever model you get with only minor software differences.
There is also a dinosaur-shaped model which is obviously more desirable but they were out of stock, unfortunately. It has a built-in battery and charges via the usual USB cable.
Technical.
The camera is allegedly 12 megapixels, and on its highest setting it does indeed produce images 4032 x 2880 pixels. However, the quality is horrendous. It’s clear the sensor is more like 1 megapixel and the images are interpolated up by onboard software. This makes the different quality settings pretty much irrelevant, except the high setting makes the date and time stamp (which can’t be turned off) so tiny it’s almost invisible.
The files are saved on a removable 32GB micro-SD card in JPEG format. This means they can be transferred to another device and saved or manipulated. There are however limitations.
Care needs to be taken with the print quality, filter and other settings as these are not alterable once the image is shot. The camera menu allows you to cycle through lots of options, mostly designed to keep kids amused like superimposed cartoon moustaches, horns, glasses etc. or graphic frames, most of which feature unicorns for some reason.
There are a couple of useful settings: a black and white mode which helps predict how the monochrome print will look, plus some digital colour filters: red, blue, green and yellow. This last is very good for increasing the density in blue skies which otherwise print disappointingly light.
In my researches I found some models have the option to shoot and print as a negative, but it’s a bit of a lottery whether a specific model or firmware has it or not. (These things don’t exactly come with detailed spec sheets!). This one doesn’t but there is a workaround. See below.
Printing:
There are two print quality options. As I’ve said, the ‘Dot Mode’ setting is interesting and distinctive and despite its super-low resolution it gives the effect of sharpness and contrast better than the “Fine mode” which does show more detail but tends to look grey and dull.
There is also a Print Density’ option which allows five levels, from 0 to 4. I find the prints can be a little too light with washed-out highlights even on the densest level but this varies with different papers
The image prints immediately by default, like an old Polaroid but this can be switched off and images printed later. Handy if you want to be selective about which ones you print, or to make multiple copies.
Image Modification
Apart from basic print density adjustment and dot/fine options there isn’t anything which allows post-shot modifications. However, the micro-SD card is removable so the image files can be removed to a computer.
The files are basic jpegs and will copy and save to a computer with no problems. However, if you want to modify an image then reload it back onto the camera’s micro-SD card, care needs to be ta
Care needs to be taken not to alter the file format or the camera will refuse to recognise it. I don’t have the digital expertise to know what’s going on but I suspect the camera’s on-board interpolation isn’t in a format compatible with applications like Photoshop, as even with the exact same file name and .JPEG suffix saving didn’t work.
Luckily, the Mac-native image software ‘Preview’ manages to keep whatever odd Chinese formatting intact and so I can modify and re-print files. Preview is very basic compared with Photoshop or Lightroom but it does allow you to invert the tones to make a negative*, alter levels, brightness, contrast and the like and add text.
Preview doesn’t prompt you to save your changes but just automatically saves the changed file when you close it. Work either directly on the card file or (better) a local copy on the computer and transfer it to the card when ready to print.
*to invert and image, select “adjust colour” and swap highlight and shadow sliders in the histogram window)
Once or twice I’ve had pictures which the camera displays on screen but refuses to print. I’m guessing some sort of file corruption is the cause.
The workaround is to save the pictures to the computer and re-photograph them off the screen with the camera. This sounds sketchy in the extreme but as the camera quality is so low it actually works very well! It would be another way of making negatives or other post-production modifications.
Of course, we can’t expect super quality or to be able to modify things much in post-production. This is a very cheap camera after all and this should be embraced, much like Marek Larwood’s wonderful Crap Camera Club (see Instagram @crapcameraclub or Youtube etc.) the lo-fi aspect of the equipment should inspire creativity: Finding out what this thing does well (or interestingly) is the challenge.
Well, what does it do?
The thermal camera is best at simple, graphic images which don’t rely on subtle detail or smoothly graded tones. The prints are only about 2in x 3in unless you enlarge them so single images need to be easily readable. As the prints are so dirt cheap though, multiple pictures have quite a bit of potential. I’ve always enjoyed the imperfectly aligned collages of prints popularised by David Hockney as “Joiners” (and I’m old enough to remember him first making them in the 80s) and these work well for that. The pictures print along the strip like film negs so grids of pictures a la Thomas Kellner (or Hockney) should be possible. I also like the idea of telling a story by shooting and printing pictures in sequence along a continuous strip of paper.
I haven't had time to explore the potential for paper negative making yet but when I do I'll update this article.
The social aspect is probably this thing's greatest strength. Others have written about the obvious 'toy' look meaning you don't get taken seriously or as a threat (what horrible times we live in!) but I've found it is even more positive than that.
I was taking a picture of a friend's dog in a café recently and people on the neighbouring tables took an interest in this funny little yellow blob which spat out pictures. Naturally I took some more, giving people the prints, which they loved!
There's something very interesting in the difference between the act of photographing, often seen as taking something and the act of making a picture for someone. The fact that I can print another copy for myself means I am in fact 'taking' but it's not seen that way. I need to explore this some more.
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