I have a few different cameras. The one I most use is my Nikon D90. I can take thousands of pictures and all it costs me is a little electricity and the time it takes to process them. Since the dawn of the new digital revolution with digital cameras popping out of people’s chests across the world at a rapid rate, the price of medium format cameras have gone down! Which makes it a great opportunity to get into it.

Although there are exceptions to this rule, a lot of the medium format cameras are now significantly more obtainable.

The camera above is a Zeiss Ikon which cost me around £8. Another camera I laid my hands for a cheap price is the Coronet Captain which cost less than the Ikon at about £5. Shown below, it’s a pretty basic box camera, which was made 20 or 30 years ago by Coronet, who are a Birmingham camera manufacturer no longer in operation. It’s dead simple to operate and the photographs which come out are larger than the standard 12 pictures you get on a roll of medium format, and you only get 8. There are two focus settings, the ability to set a timer, or add a green filter – but the best bit are the two view finders which are both waste level. One is for landscape shots and the other is for portrait. Genius!

The cameras which have waist level viewfinders create a completely different photograph to cameras which you hold up to your eyes and point and shoot. Images of people are in the middle of their body, and so produce a completely different sense of that person. The quality of the photographs which it produces is very interesting and completely unique, and unique per camera too. Each one will have it’s own little discrepencies in the manufacturing process and could have slight issues with the light seal, which all makes it very interesting.

So, if you’re after a new and interesting camera which is simple to get to grips with, cheap to buy and you can throw around as much as you like, here are some to look out for: Coronet Captain, Hasselblad 500c/m, Mamiya C330, Yashica Mat 124G, Lubitel 2.

Photos by me: Zeiss Ikon and Coronet Captain

No related posts.

As is usually the case over the festive holiday period, I had a little more time on my hands than usual. After seeing a number of adverts for the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A I decided to go and check it out and see what all the fuss was about…

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of translating digital ideas into physical reality. The idea of taking a set of data, either made up or recorded from somewhere and representing that in a digital way. The Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A is a demonstration of just that. Digital ideas represented in an easy to understand way.

The exhibition was split into three distinct parts: Code, Network and Interactivity. Code simply showed what could be done with raw data and the different ways in which it can be represented. I particularly liked the Digital Zoetrope by Troika London in this section which comprised text spinning on the outside of a cylindrical object, and appeared to slow down periodically in order to reveal certain facts.

Network contained exhibitions which displayed information which used a network in order to supply the information. There were a number of different ideas present here which mainly seemed to aggregate data and provide a visual representation of the data. One of the possibly more well known exhibits is the Exquisite Clock, where users who have downloaded the iPhone app can contribute an image to the clock pool. The clock uses these contributed images to display the time.

The interactivity section was by far the largest, in space and numbers. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Make Out display was one of the most intriguing with a six screen display with lots of videos of people kissing, sourced from the internet.

Other installations which I really liked included the Vanetian Mirror by Fabrica, which essentially recorded a long exposure picture but in a digital form. It was displayed on a high definition screen, almost life size. Because of the long exposure, subjects would have to sit or stand still for a few minutes before being completely and clearly shown.

Daniel Rozin’s Weave Mirror was also extrememly clever using motors, electronics and laminated c-shaped prints to display a reflection of whatever was in front of the mirror. The mirror was constantly moving to reflect what it saw using a gradient from light to dark.

Alth0ugh not by any means the last of the exhibition, Body Paint by Mehmet Akten seemed to be one of the most enjoyable interactive exhibitions with people throwing themselves and everything else they had up, down and around in front of the display which altered the paint on the digtial canvas. A very neat idea, and very well made!

Overall, the exhibition really shows off current trends, capabilities and performance by digital designers around us. The multitude of ways data can be represented, used, manipulated and displayed are seemingly unlimited. This, it seems, is the future – digital ideas which transcend the virtual world and real world boundaries, and bring some of the human elements back into computers.

Human input, digital output!

Related posts:

1. Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams at The Design Museum

The end of the year usually gets me thinking about the future and this year is no different. Current technology and the demands for unique content seems to be growing at an ever increasing pace, and nothing shows this more than the accelleration of mobile devices with their app stores. Apple iPhone App Store, Google Android Market, Blackberry App World, Nokia Ovi Store, and everyone else who is following suit at the moment. But where does this app business all lead? And what does it get us?

The manufacturers have provided and are building on the platforms, and it’s up to the users to create the content, for themselves or for other users. The greatest solutions and answers permiate their way to the surface and become the most well known and widely used.

So, what does the future hold for the app?

The movies depict a future of robots being delivered to our houses, as in iRobot or A.I. and arriving as a close representation of our human selves, capable of everything we can throw at them. Capable of cooking, cleaning, administering medication, mending and making things… but how long would the development and perfection of all of these things take? How long would the development of all the apps in the iPhone store have taken if Apple developed them all before the release of the iPhone? Well, probably a lot longer than it has taken.

Perhaps all we need is numerous organisations to develop the framework, build the platforms, invent the language and create the rules which can be the blank canvas for others to use as a test bed onto which they can throw their ideas. Robot owners can download their applications, test and rate them and provide feedback. Survival of the fittest.

A competitive environment similar to the app store environment of the moment, but with robots and applications which use their motor and processing capabilities, will throw up interesting results.

So, what will happen for the future? How long will it be before robots are available to everyone, like mobile devices are today. Will there even be a time when everyone has their own personal robot assistant? Only time will tell!

Photo by alliewiki

No related posts.