In my continued quest to find beauty in the photos made by toy cameras, I’ve come to broaden my views on what makes for an interesting photo. Growing up with cheap 35mm film cameras, disposable plastic boxes from Kodak and Fujifilm, 110 cameras, and APS cameras, I was never much about technical perfection anyway. Chasing megapixels is a fool’s adventure powered by marketing departments. One of my favourite film cameras was actually a Fujifilm APS camera – low on image quality, but high on ease of use and fun.
Bricks and concrete in the morning sun – Kodak Chamera with added film grain
It must have been truly magical to see images appear on film plates more than a century ago. Now, image recording is a daily routine ~ surveillance cameras all around, smartphones, digital keychain cameras that fit in pockets, AI that can generate talking flying pig animations, social media platforms saturated by snaps of the junk of day-to-day life, the latest and greatest from Sony. Image-making is so commonplace, we hardly notice the magic of being able to freeze time inside a frame.
Shadow ladder – with film grain added in Exposure X7
Of course, a good photo is about more than technical perfection and the money spent on gear ~ light and shadow, shape and angle, an interesting subject, framing and composition, emotion and vibe, story-telling ~ all of these elements can be communicated through even the cheapest of cameras.
Once synonymous with photography and the venerable Kodak Moment, the Kodak company has undergone multiple transformations over the last century. Having once dominated the film era, Kodak found itself in a war with Fujifilm in the 1990s whilst it awkwardly straddled the analog and digital imaging worlds.
It’s too simplistic to say that Kodak struggled because it didn’t adapt quickly enough to digital photography. Having researched and invented early digital imaging in the 1970s, the common view is that failure to invest in digital technologies caused their downfall. But Kodak did, in fact, produce many consumer digital cameras in the early 2000s and did manage to gain reasonable market share for a while. Even industry titans like Nikon and Canon struggled to devise a winning strategy in the digital imaging market as smartphones rose to prominence, so Kodak wasn’t alone.
Kodak may not have been agile enough to pivot completely from a huge historical investment in chemicals and film production, but in recent years, after Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, they have managed to make some headway in a difficult market. It helps that the Kodak brand is still so strong and sought after by their partners and licensees.
And so, we come to the intriguing Kodak Charmera ~ a teeny tiny digital toy camera that can live with the car keys in your pocket or get lost down the back of your couch. I received one as a Christmas gift this year. It’s made by RETO Production Ltd, who have a license from Kodak to use their well-known name on products.
Even though image quality from the 1.6 megapixel sensor isn’t anything special, it also records choppy video with sound, has a LED flash, a hole-in-body optical viewfinder, and features the cutest and smallest colour LCD on the back I’ve ever seen, making it a real charmer of a camera.
Structures in lo-fi ~ Kodak Charmera set to Black and White, with added Tri-X grain
The Charmera features a number of filters and frames. I like using it in black and white mode, if only to disguise some of the worst noise. Adding some film grain in editing leans into the lo-fi aesthetc and also covers up some of the oversharpening and oversmoothing that toy cameras aggressively apply. Of course, pixel peeping is not what this camera is about, and even adding some simulated film grain in post-processing feels like a bit too much effort! The Kodak Charmera is, if nothing else, a neat fun toy. It’s also stealthy enough to take out for some gritty street photos.
Corrugations and blown highlights in the coffee shop
The Kodak Charmera reminds me of seeing pictures for the first time from cheap old phones and early digital cameras. Maybe it’s not quite the same as seeing an image appear after washing chemicals over a long strip of film, but it does take me back to the early days of digital imaging when we realised we didn’t need to use flatbed scanners anymore to save images of film prints to hard drives so we could email them.
The Rusty Ruin Journal 