I snap

[imomus]

Last week I needed a new digital camera and saw a neat one -- something called an I Snap Camcorder AV-60, made by "Camson Japan" -- in the window of an electronics store on 5th Avenue. It was pretty hard to convince the burly men in the store -- I think they were Mexicans -- to part with the camera. It was the last of its kind, they said, and they weren't sure where its box and power supply were. They showed me lots of other cameras, but something about the Camson intrigued me. It had very tiny dimensions, recorded sound separately from video (good for podcasts and interviews) and had a flat base and swivel screen (both essential for tripod-free portraits). I haggled the Mexicans "down" to $120.



This camera has turned out to be mysterious, terrible, and great. I can't find a single reference to it, or its allegedly Japanese (but probably Chinese) maker, anywhere on the internet. Nobody on Flickr, for instance, uses a Camson. What's more, the pictures it takes are pretty awful: there's a blue cast on everything, the flash is pathetically inadequate, it's terrible in low light. As a result, I tend to take the kind of pictures I took in the early days of digital photography: full-on, broad daylight images of flat, graphic-designlike subjects. When I do take indoor shots, I'll often have a thumb in the region of the lens and have to boost the contrast (and therefore the grain) enormously in Photoshop, as in the shot above, taken at Jan's udon party on Sunday night.

The great part is that bad cameras sometimes take much more interesting images than good cameras. I suppose it's an extension of the lo-fi aesthetic -- why would someone choose 8-bit sounds, for instance, when they could have "sophisticated" digital synthtones capable of burbling across the sound spectrum in quad? Well, as the newly-released Germlin THRASHR album demonstrates (and Germlin is Joe Howe, also seen in the picture above, and of course responsible for the sound of the Joemus album), there's a ton of character in cheap and cheerful low resolution sounds.



Joe and his girlfriend Emma are Berlin residents now, and today they're biking down to Oderbergerstrasse to visit Bonanza Coffee Heroes. I'd join them, but Hisae and I have to head back to Jan's apartment: we're covering it for the next edition of Apartamento, the "everyday life interiors magazine" which applies lo-fi -- or perhaps "slow-fi" -- principles in its approach to design. Hisae is taking the pictures. Not with my new Camson, but her old analog Nikon. When it comes to capturing funky ambience, you don't want too funky a camera.

Joe and Momus play together at West Germany on June 24th.

Comments

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

The first digital camera I got in 2002 was a strange little semi transparent green thing. It was basically a webcam, but you could take it out and about, as took AAA batteries and had an internal memory of about 16MB AFAICR. I will try and find out the make.

Sporting only a notched ring around the aperture allowing about 3 presets (including a handy macro option), and with no electronic viewfinder or proper display, I ended up taking it on a trip to Japan in 2003. looking back at those pictures today, (http://www.flickr.com/photos/7994577@N07/sets/72157619196976907/) I recall having great fun taking them, and I can fully understand the attraction of things like Lomo. You really have to think out your shots and experiment to get anything worthwhile. A couple even turned out slightly psychedcelic, recalling overexposed or out of date film! There are a few gems amongst the dross.

In fact this camera was quite a nice transition from traditional to digital potography for me, becuase it had no LCD display playback facility, you still had to wait till you got home to see if the pictures turned out!
i was actually quite sad when, after about 10 months, the PC stopped recognising it and I had to take it back to the shop. It was, by then, out of production and I so was given a horrible pen-styled Aiptek VGA camera which used to lose the pictures and was pretty nasty. Ended up buying a nice Fuji when pices fell. I'd love to get another one of those green ones though and am always on the lookout.