I’ve been into “vintage” digital cameras for a while (vintage meaning roughly pre-2008, at least for most electronics). This is the camera that sparked my interest in the first place: a Sony Mavica FD75 that I found for $15 at a local thrift store.
From 2001, this oddly-shaped camera is a product of the early era of digital cameras, when the much-smaller digital sensors (compared to film) meant designers could experiment with new form factors – in this case, putting the lens/sensor in the top corner of the camera body.
The unique thing about this camera though isn’t how it looks – it’s how it stores photos. This camera has a floppy drive built in, and it takes regular old 3.5″ floppy disks. This seems odd, but was actually a really good move for Sony. Flash memory was expensive and new, and required dedicated readers, which made the already high barrier to digital photography higher. But almost everyone had a floppy drive on their home computer, and dozens of floppy disks lying around.
Each floppy disk holds 1.44MB of data, which translates to about 17 photos in the high-quality setting, probably about 20-24 in normal quality – pretty comparable to film, which held about 24-36 shots per roll.
I like using this camera a lot – it has fun little sounds, lots of buttons on the back, and it feels tactile to use in a way shooting with a smartphone doesn’t. The bloops and beeps it makes (characteristic of these early 2000’s Sony cameras) makes taking pictures almost feel like a game. Each picture takes a few seconds to save, accompanied by a little animation on-screen while the internal drive grinds and clunks as it writes the data.
So – how do the photos look? Well, to cut down on cost, they used a sensor that only supports a resolution of 640×480 pixels. To be fair, that’s standard resolution, and most computer monitors’ maximum back in 2001. Nowadays though, they look pretty pixelated.
Marys Peak.
Depending on what size screen you’re looking at these on, they might actually look fine – especially if you’re viewing this page on a smartphone.
The view from Chip Ross Park.
The camera has a couple of picture modes – the photo above was taken in “Solarize” – which simplifies the color palette to fewer colors, like computers from the 80’s and early 90’s sometimes were.
Another photo taken with the solarize effect.
Despite the tiny sensor size and minimal dynamic range, I managed to get some decent photos.
The 10x optical zoom makes this camera a lot more versatile than it otherwise would be, and it’s surprisingly decent at focusing.
This photo was taken at 10x zoom. It’s hard sometimes to tell if it didn’t focus, or if the photo is just so low-quality that it’s that blurry.
This photo shows something really interesting – notice the diamond shaped bokeh (the blurs of light in the background) – this indicates that the aperture in the lens (the hole that varies in size to let in more or less light) is a square shape (or diamond if you wish) – another cost-cutting measure. This would usually be pretty undesirable, but I really like the effect here. Portraits with this would be fun.
This car would have been much newer when this camera first came out.Another view of Marys Peak, the tallest peak in the Oregon Coastal Range.Despite the fuzziness, this camera actually does really well with exposure, white balance, and colors.
Believe it or not, this is actually not the worst digital camera I’ve used! That award would go to the GameBoy Camera. It isn’t even the second worst! That’s a tiny old Vivitar camera that was just awful.
Chatímanwi, or Mary’s Peak, is the tallest peak in the Oregon Coastal Range.It’s about a 45 minute drive from home, and has beautiful views and flowers in the spring.
In the middle of moving, I somehow still found time to buy another camera . . . To be fair to myself, I’ve pared my collection from about 30 to only 8 I plan to keep, so I’m doing good.
The limitations of my compact “prosumer” digital cameras (dynamic range, small sensor size) had me wanting to upgrade to a DSLR, so when I found this Nikon D200 (A high-end APS-C sensor camera from 2008), I jumped at the opportunity to snatch it, batteries, and a lens for $77.
The white spot at the upper right is lens flare – you can’t see the sun in the photo, but light from it is causing this artifact on the image.
Today I needed a break from working on moving plans. So I took the D200 out to the Mary’s River natural area, a seasonal wetland about 15 minutes from where I live.
One advantage of the larger sensor (about 6x larger than my other cameras) is the bokeh–or background blur–I can achieve with it. However, I have to be more careful of focus. Here, you can see the flower isn’t totally crisp.
In the spring, it has a ton of flowers – now less, but I still managed to see around a dozen different types.
This blackberry blossom had a ton of little beetles (or weevils?) crawling among the stamen. Poison oak was also aplenty. It’s easy to spot at this early stage, because of its red, shiny new leaves.I don’t actually know if I react to it – so far, I’ve either been extraordinarily lucky, or don’t react to its oil.Another bug! Notice the sunspots right above the bug – the flat sides are due to the physical shape of the opening in the camera lens. Some people don’t like this effect – I do.A weevil friend! You can tell due to its distinct “snoot” and antenna attached halfway up the snoot.For this photo, to get everything sharp, I had to use a smaller aperture (the hole in the lens that lets light through) – the smaller the hole, the deeper the area in focus is. The larger the hole, the less deep the area of focus is. Most of the photos above used the largest opening size in the lens. There were SO MANY DAISIES. I really wanted to pick a bouquet, but didn’t want to carry it (in addition to my camera and bag) all the way back. Wasps are pollinators too, but I still prefer honeybees 😛
One nice thing about this camera (and its 10MP sensor) is that – as long as the image is in focus enough – I can crop quite a bit. The wasp image above was about 8x larger than what you’re seeing, but due to the higher resolution of the sensor, I can crop in to just what I care about afterwards.
This old car is hanging halfway over the edge of the river bank, supported by several trees grown through it. It might be a Fiat 850 or something close, but I can’t tell for sure.I love the colors and very soft grain of this photo.More daisies . . . …Woah, not a daisy!This might be my favorite photo of this whole walk. These flowers are beautiful, and the bokeh, lighting, and colors are fantastic.I’m not sure what bird this was.Two bugs sharing a daisy!Delightfully evil looking plant.This bumblebee was a happy accident – I was snapping photos of something else and heard a buzzing near my ear!The 2015 Chevrolet Volt isn’t the sleekest of cars, but I like mine.
All for now!
All images in this post can be used under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0 license. No other images on this site may be used under this license unless otherwise noted.
Both of these days were sort of travel days so I have less content, and I decided to combine them into one post.
4/21: Last day in Malaysia
My flight out of Malaysia was at 12:10 AM, so I needed to leave for the airport around 8PM (an hour of travel to the airport + 3 hours to get through it). I also needed a solid nap before since I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the last few days, and it would be a 7-hour flight. So my plan for the day:
Get breakfast
Spend my remaining Malaysian cash at a local street market and take more photos
Nap
Go to the airport
After breakfast (which I forgot to take a photo of, but it was the same thing I got for dinner my first night in Malaysia), I started heading to the markets. However, when I pulled my camera out to take a photo, I realized it was dead. I’d forgotten to charge my spare batteries, so I instead walked to a nearby shop for some batteries. When I put them in, the camera . . . wouldn’t extend the lens!
The Olympus is dead, long live the Olympus!
I paid $5 for this camera at Goodwill in July last year, and despite it being grimy, after some cleanup it worked great. It’s since become one of my favorite cameras, being covered in manual controls, with a flip-out screen, and enough resolution to take pretty decent photos for web use (5MP). Later in the summer, I was using it on the beach and it got splashed in a sandy wave as I was trying to take a closeup photo of waves (my fault). It stopped working for a bit after that, but then started working again! The lens made a grinding noise each time I would open it, but it kept working! So I brought it on this trip, having used it for hundreds of photos since then.
Sadly, it finally seems to have given up the ghost 😦
Oh well, for $5 and probably over a thousand photos, I can’t complain! A replacement of the same model will cost around $30 if I find a nice example on eBay.
Of course, I have my phone for photos – but I really prefer a camera with a proper lens, even if it’s from 2003. So now my plan was:
Get breakfast
Spend my remaining Malaysian cash at a local street market and take more photosGo find a used camera for less than $50
Nap
Go to the airport
So, I spent the next hour and a half walking sweatily from camera store to camera store, hoping to find something of around the same era for about $50…
This store clearly used to be a photo store, but isn’t anymore. There were a surprising number of camera/film stores, though!
And didn’t find anything! The camera stores either only sold new cameras, only had film cameras, or had a small selection of too-new, too-expensive cameras.
Luckily, the next place I was headed was Tokyo – the perfect place to find a deal on an older digital camera, so I held out for a day and just used my phone.
Of course, I found more interesting vehicles – a nice example of one of the more popular moped models, a neat van, and a small (for the US) delivery truck painted to look like The Incredible Hulk.
As I walked, I also took more photos of the streets – in this area, bustling with shops and market activity.
Then, I went back for my nap. Malaysia was really cool, and I knew Japan would be too, but being sleep deprived (and less excited about how expensive Japan would be), I was having a hard time looking forward to the next leg of my trip – I would really have rather gone home.
Traveling has been really fun, and I’m glad I’m here, but it’s been hard, too. I really like having a place I’m completely comfortable in to retreat to when I need a break, and obviously when you’re traveling (and mostly in shared dorm rooms), that’s not very possible. Add that to changing cities and countries every few days, a new language that you don’t know, new cultures you have to think about, and having to figure out where to eat for every single meal every single day, and it gets pretty exhausting.
(As I’m writing this, I feel better – I still wish I could go home sooner, but that would be prohibitively expensive, and I recognize a lot of my feeling like this comes from having been behind on sleep. I’ll be at this hostel for 6 days, I just slept for 16 hours, and there are grocery stores nearby at which to get food for breakfast and any other meal I don’t want to go to a restaurant for – I’ll probably take the next few days a little easier, then feel more ready to explore Japan.)
Anyway! Post nap, I packed and headed back to the airport.
The tower near my hostel had lights along the sides that I hadn’t realized were there during the day! The street market was busier than ever, and I think I didn’t really see as much as Malaysia had to offer – I will have to come back sometime for a more dedicated trip.
On my way out, I grabbed a couple of “thousand layer patties” (little warm pastries which have chicken or beef stuffed in them) from a street shop for dinner. At the airport, I ate these alongside a Dunkin Donuts iced latte before boarding.
This plane was much more like a normal American flight, without screens, free food, or fancy seats. It did have more legroom than normal, though! I slept for most of the flight.
4/22: Camera hunting in Toyko!
The next morning around 8:30AM local time, I landed at Narita International Airport, about 65km from Toyko. Here, I charged my phone, got some cash (cards are less commonly accepted in Japan, apparently), and ate some breakfast at the airport before buying a train ticket into Toyko.
Check-in time at the hostel wasn’t till 5PM, so I headed first to Shinjuku Station, around which there are a lot of camera stores with both new and used gear.
The first few stores I stopped at I felt too poor to walk into – lots of expensive cameras (the cheapest were around $500 USD), pretty but far outside my budget (and not what I wanted, anyway). However, the third one I walked into had an “as-is” shelf, and on that shelf, an Olympus C4100! After testing it, I paid 3500 Yen ($24.50 USD) for the camera and two memory cards (it takes a different kind than my current one does).
This one is slightly older (2002 vs 2003) and a little lower quality, with 4MP instead of 5, no flip-out screen, and a slightly less nice lens. Fundamentally though, it is a very similar camera.
Glad to have found a replacement camera, I headed back out and took a few photos. It was a rainy grey day (much like Oregon!) and it made the streets wet and the bright signs pop against the grey buildings and skies.
Olympus C4100
I’m pretty happy with this camera! Straight out of the camera the images have a lot of color, though I can tell the dynamic range is worse (I had to do more minor adjustments to these images in order to bring the bright areas down and the dark areas up than I normally would do for the other camera).
I’ve seen a few of these not-quite-motorcycle, not-quite-car things around.
There were a few more camera shops to stop by, so of course I did. What, just because I found a camera doesn’t mean I won’t look at more!
I forgot to take pictures of the last camera store I went to, but it would have been a perfect place if I hadn’t already found a good camera. It was a small shop, crammed floor to ceiling with antique to (somewhat) modern cameras, mostly film, but with a good mix of digital in there too. There were a lot of cameras sold non-working, most for only a couple thousand yen ($10-30 USD). Of course they had working cameras too, also for what seemed to be good prices (under 20,000 yen in a lot of cases, or USD $140). I may have bought two parts cameras of the same model, in the hopes of combining them into one working camera… They were only $30 together!
I love how small these are! With digital cameras it’s not so surprising, but there’s only so small you can get with 35MM film. The cute factor was part of why these were so irresistible.
These are half-frame cameras, meaning they shoot two photos per one film frame (by using only half of the frame each time). This effectively halves the resolution of the photo which does decrease the quality, but means you can get either 48 or 74 shots depending on what type of film you use! With the cost of film, this is definitely a benefit.
They’re from around 1963 (62 years old!) and neither one works – the shutter doesn’t seem to properly close. I suspect (after watching a video on YouTube) that the shutter blades just need to be cleaned, but I’m not completely sure yet.
(To Felix and Katerina: I don’t think I’ll get the chance to rent a moped 😦 I believe the laws are a lot more restrictive in Japan, and in Italy and Malaysia it didn’t seem safe to do so. Someday I will go back to Barcelona, and I’ll be sure to rent one there! Instead, your moped money will go towards some nice sushi!)
All for now! Let’s hope my spare luggage space survives the next few days – no more camera shops!
Bova’s Bakery, where I got breakfast (and my passport-retrival celebration tart the night before)
I had planned to go back to Bean and Leaf Cafe for another burrito, but ended up sleeping in till almost noon! By the time I got showered and out the door, they were closed. Instead, I headed to Bova’s and got a few pasteries. I did stop at the coffee place again for another espresso, this time with a shot of hazelnut!
Wonder how this street got its name?
I wanted to check out the Boston Common (a large park in the opposite direction of the North End), so after finishing my breakfast at a table next to the burial grounds, I started walking (and snapping photos).
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I ran across another historic graveyard on the way, and snapped a few more photos of gravestones.
This one was crazy! Not only did it have the angel of death at the top, it also had a scene carved into it, plus other intricate details.Another scene at the top. Death VS an angel of some type? Not sure…A graveyard friend!
After the graveyard, I finally got to the Boston Common. The Common itself was large and pretty busy (and there wasn’t a lot to see), but right across the street is a garden park, so I spent a lot of time walking around taking photos there.
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While I was walking, I saw another (cute!) guy with a camera. While I was taking the photo below, he got a picture of me! He came up and asked me about my camera, and we had a conversation about photography and he showed me the photo of me he’d taken. I don’t remember his name though, oops!
A monument in the Common, seen through the buds on the trees.
Walking back to my hostel, I snapped a few more photos of the interesting architecture along the way.
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After another short rest, it was time to head out for dinner and to explore the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) with a friend I met along the way.
This is the best picture I had :( One problem with old digital cameras is their poor preformance in low light situations. A steadier hand and more careful setup of the shot would have helped, but for quick food photos when taking the picture isn’t the main focus at the moment, I typically just shoot and hope it turns out.
Dinner was at Hobgoblin in Chinatown, a jazz bar style restaraunt with live piano music and delicious thai food with my friend. It was their recommendation, and it was great!
Next, we took the Orange line train to the stop closest to the MFA. I really enjoyed taking the subway the few times I did in Boston – it was clean, about as fast as driving in a lot of cases, easy to navigate, and way cheaper than Uber!
We did not have enough time for the MFA (a full day seems like it might be enough? we had two hours), but we did get through a couple of exhibits on ancient art (and a few from only a few hundred years ago!). I found a lot of pieces that had patterns I think would look really cool as tattoos, so I took photos for future inspiration.
This bowl and several others near it had a simple design of a bunch of hands reaching across or into the middle.
This bowl is from 10th-11th centry Iran, and features a peacock.The simple leaf design on this jar is really pretty. It is from the Song Dynasty during the 11th-12th centuries.This design makes me think of Ginko leaves a bit, but I forgot to take a picture of the information plaque. A cute ceramic mouse (or rat?)I really liked the blue on this bowl. I only noticed the subtle koi pattern in the middle while writing this!Josh, do these count as ducks?This is what I imagine you duck farming would look like…
My friend I was exploring the museum with. The high contrast made this a little challenging for the camera, but I like how it turned out!
We accidentally wandered into an administrative wing of the museum, and found this eery-looking empty conference room. This photo is through two windows, there is outside air between the window I shot this through and the one outside the conference room. The reflections also make it interesting!
After the MFA closed at 10, we headed home. The next morning, I got breakfast at another coffee shop (this time a sour cherry cheese danish! Also delicious) and had a slow morning in. It was raining in Boston, and I got this picture from the window of my friend’s apartment (28th floor!).
The green park is the Common, where I was exploring the day before! My hostel would be to the right of the nearest skyscraper at about 2:00 from straight on.
That’s all for my Boston trip! Today’s itenerary in Barcelona is still up in the air, but it involves getting lunch and dinner, going to bed on time, and exploring! I might check out a museum, the beach, or a local park. Who knows, maybe all three?
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