Bottom line, I either use my massive Minolta 7000i camera weighing about 300 gms or look for a digital camera. The latter, a new one, with fancy optics, good choice of settings, but price!! Set you back by € 400-600. And what if another rivirine mishap should occur!
So I thought and consulted the oroogle (google the oracle), and found out about LOMOGRAPHY. Infact it reminded me of the days back as a kid with my first ever box camera. And also about what photography means to me. Which brought me (not alone) to the idea of reusing a so-called single-use camera.
And what was really scary was the idea that single-use cameras can be reused, but for the commercial considerations companies spend unbelievable amounts of energy, materials and time on selectively "re-cycling" them- plastic gets crushed, pelleted and made into, well squeaky new plastic. Don't believe me, watch this FUJI FILM demo. Impressive for the robots, scary for the energy spent doing all this!
So I decided to unsheath the camera I had bought from one of the drug stores (drogerie markt).
Opened the back carefully, as advised by Camera Hacker Chieh Cheng for the Kodak Ultra or whatever they call their "use-and-throw" cameras. And the nice part was after finishing the roll, it has already rolled into the cannister that conventional film rolls come in.The unpleasant surprise is there is no spool.
Take a look at the opened up read-view.
Unlike CamerHacker who had to cut away the other teeth of the forward wheel, here the forward wheel comes with the conventional 2-toothed wheel that locks into the inside of the film roll.
The outstanding issues:
1. whether an unspooled virgin film will hold inside the left-side of the camera and not loop over inside.
2. how to take multiple pictures on the same frame, i.e. disable the mechanism that prevents you from taking a picture on the same exposure multiple times (since I want to play with overlays).
I will keep you posted how this goes.
