It’s almost crazy that I would take a drive to a nearby country town around sunset with both my Nikon Z5 and the tiny toy Kodak Charmera and only use the toy camera. But that’s exactly what I did. It’s as though it was altogether too much effort for me to open up the bag, switch on the Nikon, and make a few photos. Pulling the Charmera from my pocket as hundreds of fast-moving black ants toiled about my sneakers seemed easier and lessened the risk of them getting a foothold in my socks. The bites are known to be painful!

This time, I used the standard colour filter of the charming little Kodak. Dynamic range is woeful and the colours are washed out, including ugly colour shifts, but that’s all part of the allure of the lo-fi look. I pushed the saturation, added a touch of warmth with the white balance slider, reduced clarity to blur the photo a little, and added regular fine film grain in Exposure X7:

Here’s the original version:

Yet another nice piece of graffiti below. You can see the purple colour shift at the top of the frame. This is the edited version – same edits in Exposure X7 as the previous photo:

Here’s the original unedited version:

In both cases, I think the edits reduce some of the harshness and add subtle visual interest via the film grain.