The camera film industry may be struggling, but there are certain segments that are still profitable. One such niche is the one-time-use disposable film camera market, and Ilford Photo wants a piece of the pie. The company, which makes widely used films, papers, and chemicals, announced two new black & white disposable cameras today.
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Ithaca College, a small private school in New York, recently conducted a fun photo experiment to capture a day in the life of the students on campus. Instead of sending a photographer around to various student hotspots, the student social media team left ten disposal cameras in five locations around campus with a note that read:
Hey, I just left this camera here for the day. Take some fun pictures with you and your friends! I’ll be back later to pick it up
At the end of the day, all the cameras were collected, all the film was developed, revealing an “authentic view of a day at Ithaca College.”
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Mike Warren has written up an in-depth tutorial on how you can build a 360° camera hat using 6-8 disposable cameras. The cameras are worn around the head like a crown, and are simultaneously trigger using a single shutter release with the help of servo motors that depress the shutter when triggered. Warren writes,
With the camera array sitting on your head, you’re able to capture a 360° panorama view of your surroundings. This project requires no special electronics knowledge and can be assembled in about an hour.
I designed this camera array off something I saw on the “Radar Detector” music video by Darwin Deez. But, after making the camera hat, everyone kept asking if it was a low-fi version of Google Street View. It’s more the former than the latter, but people can draw their own interpretations.
Yesterday I attended a VIP sneak preview of the new IKEA PS designer furniture line in Malmö, Sweden. I was not the slightest bit interested in the designer furniture. I was there for one reason, to play with and acquire the new KNÄPPA, IKEA’s cardboard camera.
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Check out this strange looking digital camera made by IKEA out of cardboard. It was included as part of a press kit at an event in Europe recently, and apparently the “disposable” camera might go on sale sometime soon in IKEA stores. It uses two AA batteries and stores up to 40 photographs in the built-in memory. Images can be downloaded to your computer using the USB connection that swings out from one of the corners of the camera.
(via Fancy via Gizmodo.it)
This video shows a social experiment in which disposable cameras were left unattended in various public locations with a simple message: “Take a Photo”. Hidden cameras were stationed nearby to observe how people responded to the cameras, and to provide some behind-the-scenes footage to how the various photographs were captured.
A few weeks ago, Brooklyn resident Katie O’Beirne did a weekend project in which she left a disposable camera on a Prospect Park bench with a note asking passer-bys to snap a photograph. After getting the film developed and finding some cool photos, O’Beirne decided to continue with the project, leaving disposable cameras in a number of other spots around NYC. The resulting photographs can be seen on a Tumblr page she set up called “new york shots“.
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iPhone photography app Hipstamatic was the king of retro filters before Instagram came along and stole its crown. Now, the developers are hoping to capitalize on the retro photo app craze with a new idea: delivering a disposable camera experience on an iPhone. Pocket-lint reports,
Hipstamatic D-Series is set to bring back the film feel to your digital photography by preventing you from actually looking at your pictures the second after you’ve snapped them. Working like an old disposable camera, you have to finish all 24 shots before it’ll let you go back and review how they all came out. Sounds crazy to begin with but try not to think about coming almost full circle and it might just be crazy enough to work.
“It’s an opportunity to bring back the idea that you have this roll of film and you shoot with it, and you think about what you’re seeing in the moment, more so than snapping a photo and looking at it, deleting it or taking another one,” said Lucas Buick [founder of Hipstamatic]. [...] “It really is a completely different way to experience photography that a lot of people have forgotten about, but it wasn’t so long ago that people don’t remember it, and that’s the key.”
So basically, it’s an app that restricts its users — like an app that only lets people shoot in black and white. While it may sound like a lame idea to the general population, the market for this type of thing (e.g. hipsters) might just be big enough for it to attract a following. They do have one thing going for them though: the app will be free once its released later this month.
(via Pocket-Lint via VentureBeat)
Image credit: Hipstamatic Projekt IV. Chunky + Cano Cafenol by Zé.Valdi
Five years ago, web designer Matthew McVickar decided to give one lucky disposable camera a free vacation, sending it through the mail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Honolulu, Hawaii with the instructions “Take a photo before you pass it on!”. When he got the camera back, there were seven photographs taken by various workers in the United States Postal Service that show the cameras journey (and the inner workings of the USPS!).
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You’ve probably seen countless photographs already of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March, but they were likely captured by professional photographers looking to have the images published in news outlets. What, then, would photographs look like if they were taken by ordinary people who were directly affected by the disaster? Aichi Hirano found out the answer to this question by distributing 50 disposable cameras to survivors at a number of shelters with a note that read,
Please take photos of things you see with your eyes, things you want to record, remember, people near you, your loved ones, things you want to convey… please do so freely. And please enjoy the process if you can, even if it’s just a little bit.
Hirano did this once shortly after the disaster, then again two months later.
Rolls Tohoku (via Conscientious)
