A New Camera; A Field Trip

In my continued obsession with viewfinder photography I've picked up another old TLR camera, a Brownie Starflex. The Starflex was manufactured by Kodak from 1957-1964 and originally cost around $10.00 (flash attachment included). It's tiny and weighs about as much as a size medium t-shirt (6.5 oz) and is almost entirely made of plastic, including the optics. Earlier this weekend I made an adapter out of foam-core to hold my digital camera and did some indoor test shots. The compactness of the design of the camera in relation to the dimensions of the plastic viewfinder produces a fisheye lens effect (not unlike a pinhole camera) when shooting digitally through the viewfinder.


So today, with new camera in hand, Kym & I took a 15 min. drive over to Tybee Island to try it out (temp. in the upper 50's today - not too bad for mid-January in Savannah). I also brought along my Brownie Reflex. Anyway, here's some results - these were all shot from the Tybee pier:




water, water everywhere:



This is my lo-fi attempt at a Hiroshi Sugimoto:


The sun behind clouds:


The verdict? Well, the photos themselves are no great shakes (kinda Photo 101 in terms of subject matter and composition) but I'm pleased with the results. I need to remember to keep the digital camera on it's macro setting, since the camera is actually focusing on the surface of the viewfinder - only about a third of my shots were in focus . Also, all of the images were overexposed a bit so I had to tweak the levels in Photoshop, although I didn't make any color/hue adjustments.


And now, some music: