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Fisheye Business- Amateur Photographer
I’ve been fascinated by the world of ‘toy’ cameras for over a year now and wrote about my love of the Holga camera in a previous issue of Amateur Photographer. The term toy camera is one that describes a collection of lo-fi cameras made in China and Russia that were originally made for low income people of these countries, as a way to enjoy photography as cheaply as possible. They are low quality cameras made mainly of plastic and yet their characteristics that make them of poor quality have appealed to photographers all around the world who have fallen in love with their unique images.
Since purchasing the Holga, I have added a few more models to my arsenal, yet unsurprisingly my gadget bag for them hardly seems to have gained any weight! My latest purchase is the Lomography Fisheye 2. This camera is the second model of its type and has to be one of the funkiest cameras around. As the name suggests, it takes circular, fisheye style images with 180° vision, but unlike the expensive ultra-wide optic equivalents made by the likes of Canon, Nikon and Sigma, this model cost all of £40 making it the cheapest fisheye camera on the market.
As you would expect for the price, the camera is mainly plastic, apart from some brushed metal finish on the body and lens for styling purposes. It takes regular 35mm film, but is fixed focus and fixed exposure, with a switch on top offering the choice of normal setting (1/100 sec) or B setting for anything longer than this. Its manual wind and rewind but it allows you to take multiple exposures for creativity. There is a small flash built in and any weight in the camera will come from the AA battery needed to power the flash! A large, sphere shaped viewfinder sits in the hot-shoe to give you an idea of what the lens is showing and that’s it, away you go.
I decided to give the camera a test run on a weekend in London. Even though I have photographed the sights here time and time again with my regular cameras, I could see the potential of some exciting new images from a new perspective with this unique camera.
The instruction booklet encourages you to get a close as possible to your subject, even up to 1 inch away and fill the frame. So this was my approach, as well as getting down low and pointing the camera at odd angles that I wouldn’t normally dream of doing to get regular shots.
The freedom of walking around the city with this camera was a breath of fresh air. No heavy gadget bag to lug around and no tripod either and the chance to really experiment and try some new techniques was a real eye opener. It was a beautiful sunny weekend and I think this helped with the images, as the camera takes in a lot of sky due the wide lens and a cloudy sky would not have really looked so good.
I had timed the trip to coincide with the London Open House weekend, when lots of London’s famous buildings are open to the public. This gives you a unique insight into
the mainly unseen world of the famous landmarks and included the Lloyds building, The Bank of England, City Hall and Portcullis House. I also added to my itinerary many buildings to shoot inside that are open to the public anyway, like the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and Tate Modern.
I had loaded the camera with fast 400 ISO colour negative film, which has better tolerance for exposure error to allow for the fixed, limited exposure on the camera, but even this was not going to be enough for some of the interiors. Therefore, I often switched to the B setting and just took some random exposure times with guesswork to allow more light onto the film. I guess these ranged from around 1/30 sec down to 1/8 sec depending on how long I held my finger on the shutter button and obviously some exposures worked and some didn’t. This did prove successful on some images I took on the London Underground and allowed me to get some blurred images of the trains, as well as images taken on the escalators, with great sense of movement in the final picture.
There were some obvious landmarks that I visited especially to shoot with the camera which I could see working well, like the London Eye, Trafalgar Square and Mansion House, but I also got some unexpected and successful images at Portobello Market, St Pancras Station and along the South Bank.
You have to be confident to get in close and frame with the camera literally inches from the subject and it’s certainly a camera to get to know people with! If you can’t fill the frame enough the pictures can be a little boring but at the same time it’s amazing just how much the camera can fit onto an image. Even the largest building and subjects can be easily framed.
Just like my original Holga, the fisheye is a joy to use and encourages creativity and so is only limited by your imagination. The picture quality may not be the sharpest, but again, just like the Holga this is part of the appeal. The resulting images even show the inside of the lens housing, which can add to the framing effect.
With the films back from processing, I scan the images into the computer with my regular film scanner. The images are then tweaked slightly with levels and curves and a slight boost given to colour saturation. If the image isn’t working in colour, then I do a conversion to black and white with the channel mixer and this allows me the choice of both types of images without having to carry around both colour and b&w films. Changing films after shot four of thirty-six is not really convenient as you can imagine.
If your photography has become a bit stale and you seek new inspirations, ditch the pixels for a day and go back to shooting film in a unique way. The world is round after all, so why not spend some time viewing it this way too.
© Craig Roberts
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