What you can get for $38 - Super Awesome Trendiness *sigh*
I was walking by an Urban Outfitters and saw their huge shelf of plastic toy cameras. One of them looked a little familiar... wth? they're making replicas of the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim?
Available in "WHITE SLIM ANGEL" and "BLACK SLIM DEVIL" with a "SUPER FAT LENS." It looks like they used the exact same plastic molds, even the grip pattern is the same. I wonder if they had to pay Vivitar for any licensing. Personally, I think all of this would be fine, as long as they were cheap. I hear the black version has a rubberized grippy surface.
Price? $38. The $18 price tag in the first shot is probably for something stupid like "official LOMO film".
*sigh* Urban Outfitters... still, this is better than hearing that they sell a "Money Band" for $6. My rubber band wallet also cost $6... but it came with some free asparagus.
Update: a quick internet search has confirmed that people are jumping on these and paying up to $52 for them before shipping. Vivitar UW&S are now referred to as having "legendary status" and are $30+ in very beat up used form. Maybe the mark up is for the beat-up look 'cred factor.'
What you can get for $2 plus shipping - Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim Review
Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim Review
Just over a year ago, I started reading about the whole lomo photography fad. Being the trend-whore that I am, of course I wanted to try it out, but I wasn't about to pay $250 for a hyped up LC-A. Browsing more and more for a cheaper solution, I stumbled upon some websites and Flickr groups for what has been called the "poor man's lomo"-- the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim.
In nutshell, it's a disposable camera that can be reloaded with film. With an all-plastic body and lens, it's incredibly cheap, but differentiates itself by having an ultra-wide lens at 22mm (hence the name). A wide-angle lens was something I also wanted to play around with, so I picked mine up on eBay for $2, plus a few dollars shipping. A lens for my SLR that wide would cost hundreds of dollars. I figured it would be a cheap way to try out both lomo and a wide-angle lens.
Aside from the wide field of view, the tech specs aren't anything special (Aperture f/11 and Shutter Speed 1/125th sec), but it's known for an extreme vignette effect/defect.
Using it is a snap, just:
- Look through the viewfinder. (optional)
- Click the button.
- Remember to wind the film.
That's it. No focusing, no fiddling with aperture, shutter speed, white balance, metering. Just a single button.
I say the viewfinder step is optional since the lens is so wide that anything in the general direction it's pointed is probably going to be in frame, plus it's not that accurate anyway. It's common to have fingers in the shots that I let other people take from when they hold the camera since the angle is so wide and the viewfinder doesn't even cover all of it. I'd say it's not showing at least 5-10%.
In the past year, I've probably put fewer than 10 rolls of film through it. While going through them to pick out a few for this post, I realized that most of the pictures are actually pretty crappy, and that some entire rolls of shots would be unusable, but I had loads of fun taking them. I think it's because I realized that with the wide-angle lens forces me to get in people's faces to get a better shot. It's definitely a different shooting experience compared to using a huge zoom on an SLR.
Pros:
- Incredibly cheap $2 (but you have to pay for film and processing)
- Fun
- Lightweight and pocketable - I don't like to carry stuff in my pockets while snowboarding, but the camera and some film made it up on a few trips the last two seasons.
- Random effects from the cheap lens and construction - lens flares, vignetting, soft focus, light leaks
- "Film look-and-feel" - some people like film grain
- Wide-angle lens - gives the photos a different perspective from the usual snapshot.
Cons: (of course these are all considered 'pros' if you write them off as lomo experience "features")
- No control - just one button, no way to control the exposure on the camera.
- Unpredictable results - what you see might not be what you get
- Only works in sunny conditions - since there's no way to adjust the exposure, you're limited to trying to adjust the light in the environment. which can be hard.
- Film experience and look-and-feel - you have to lug around film, pay and wait for it to be processed, and get parts of pictures chopped off it it was at the end of the roll.
Conclusion:
If you're at all curious about it, I'd say get one and try it out! Even including film and processing costs, it's probably the cheapest camera you can try. It would take 10-20 rolls of processed film before it approached the same cost of a Canon Digital Point & Shoot or the Lomo LC-A body alone. And if you've already shot 10-20 rolls of film, you must be having fun. If not, hype it up, and sell it to some hipster for $200. The cheaper it looks, and the more expensive it is, the hotter the trend.
My biggest question while taking photos with the camera was always, "am I actually taking an interesting photo, or am I just recreating a lomo cliche and using the effects as a crutch?" I definitely caught myself thinking about taking pictures of old buildings, giant signs, broken tricycles, moss on trees, the shadow of a wrought-iron fence and other things that a 17-year-old that thinks she's getting in to photography might take.
--
PS. I've tried posting this four or fives times, and I just can't figure out how Posterous decides which photos to group together in an album, and which to separate. I tried from both mail.app and gmail's web interface, both using HTML formatting. I've given up and hope that they're all at least in an album, with the ubercliche shots at the end. Check out what it did here. It's supposed to be 12 photos, alternating 1 photo, 1 caption. It split out three photos, and then split the rest in to two albums.
Northstar with Jon and Sidney - Photos
The season's winding down, so Sidney, Jon, and I hit up Northstar and stayed at the Lockheed cabin this weekend. Most of the mornings, we spent cruising down groomed runs, and the afternoons lapping Pinball and the progression park. The Stash was closed. I forgot how nice and long the runs are here at Northstar, even if they are a bit flat.
This was also the first time I've bothered to bring a camera snowboarding this year-- my trusty Vivitar Ultra Slim & Wide. Even though it looks like we're 50 feet away in the pictures, we're actually probably only ten to fifteen feet away, the angle is just that wide. I wish I could have seen a few pictures of myself boarding earlier in the season. It's painfully obvious that I'm leaning back *hard* a lot of the times when I shouldn't be. That explains my 180s problem.
As usual, there were a handful of pictures that I thought were going to be awesome in my minds eye, but either didn't look so awesome, or didn't come out at all. Such is life with film on a $2 plastic camera-- not so trusty after all. One missing picture in particular is of Jon bonking a log, 180 out. Actually, frozen in a single frame of film, there are no guarantees it would have looked cool anyway.
Three more days of boarding planned for this season. I'll work on not leaning back so hard.
PS. I borrowed Jon's old Rome 390 bindings to test out, and Sidney is smooth on her 5050s now.
About Me
Slin LeeI post my photos and stuff here at slinlee.com.
Other inspirational or funny random things I find go to SoPre.Posterous.com.
I like to bike, snowboard, take photos, and think about UX stuff.
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