Camera Labs

Sony a350, Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 at 75mm
1/125s, f/8, ISO100, flash via ceiling bounce

I was going for a product reference type shot. It was harder than I thought to get the camera placed to minimise perspective effects causing skewed angles. And there's a little more shadow than I'd like too, you can see slight reflection on the surface I put it on.

The camera is the first one I have a tangible memory of. I'm pretty sure I had another compact 35mm camera before this one, but I can't remember what that was. The selling point of this was the compact size, as it was overall smaller than 35mm cameras were at the time. The cost is that the disc film took I think something like 12 or 15 shots, each one being much smaller than a 35mm frame so the quality was reduced. But for sunlit snapshots it was just the thing when out and about.

This was to play with the new lens on the Sony as I've not dome much with it even though I've had it almost a week. I'm still trying to figure out if I'm getting FF at f/2.8 or is the AF just not so repeatable at close focus.

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Canon DSLRs: 7D, 5D2, 1D, 600D, 450D full spectrum, 300D IR mod
Lenses: EF 35/2, 50/1.8, 85/1.8, 135/2+SF, 28-80 V, 70-300L, 100-400L, TS-E 24/3.5L, MP-E 65, EF-S 15-85 IS
3rd party: Zeiss 2/50 makro, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300 f/2.8 OS, Celestron 1325/13
Tinies: Sony HX9V.

Pretty good! From my experience product photogrpahy, is rather difficult, as i found out a couple of days ago!

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Ed


Canon 40D + Grip | Sigma 10-20 EX | 17-85 | Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 EX II | 50 F/1.8 | 430 EX II + Other Stuff
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Within a split-second your picture took me years back.
This camera was one of my childhood dreams. I "just" had an AGFA camera back then.
Meanwhile I forgot which film (long and cartridge-like) you put into the latter. But I remember one could buy a flash cube that contained four flashes to put on top of the camera. And one had to turn its side after one got used or it got turned when going to the next picture.

And for the Kodak one didn't have to buy such a thing anymore since it already contained a re-usable flash. Imagine that ...
I remember having used this Kodak and having seen its "spoke wheel" film but I never owned it unfortunately.

Would you be able and maybe willing to take a picture of its back?
edit: Excuse me - just have seen the back of this camera on Ebay. Quite --- uninteresting. Hope you haven't started taking it. Thank you!

Thanks,
HTG

popo.......Hope you don't mind, your taking me back too....had to put this in.

HTG.......Is this the one your refering to?
The old Kodak Instamatic with the "Flash Cube", was also known as the "Magic Cube".
It was groundbreaking in the early 1960's......
Each time you took a pic. the cube would rotate 1/4 turn untill you used all 4 sides, then you popped it off and snapped on a fresh one.....It was coooool. The picture quality wasn't the greatest though.

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Nikkor 70-300mm vr, Nikkor 18-105mm vr

Canon "AE-1 Program" film SLR camera user since 1983

C&C always welcome
Joe

In my first answer I got carried away by memories, popo, and forgot to say something about your product photo. All in all this is a really great shot. And only if one wanted to find something to critizise one could ... as you mentioned, the shadows (left and right) or some dust particles on the black plastic. I can see that it must have been difficult to avoid reflections. But I would be more than happy to be able to create a shot like this myself.

About this Kodak: As far as I remember it was really slim. It's amazing to me how much love comes up remembering it. The slider underneath the lens was for protecting the lens as far as I remember. But what about the turning of the round film? Was this done mechanically on the back or already done with the help of the batteries? Bet it was the latter. The greyish button with the black outlining was the release if I'm right. Didn't one turn the flash on on the back of the camera?

One of these days, I am going to find me one on ebay if possible. Thank you for this shot.

@ jka: Yes, it was such a flash cube/magic cube! (Personally, I only know a "magic cube" as a Rubic's cube ... something to play with in the 80's. So it's interesting that you called this flash thingy like that, too.)

Such a flash cube was - of course - run with chemicals. They were unusable once flashed. But for me they were really "magic" since I loved to see the "bulbs" in them turning blue as seen on your picture. And no "bulb" looked ever the same, they burned differently. As far as I am able to remember, I think they became a little warm when flashed.

Just recently I thought about these flash cubes because of another aspect:
From an environmental point of view, I bet, they were a complete disgrace to Earth. How many hundreds of millions must have been sold since - as you say and thank you for that information - the 60's! They got carried to landfills and try to rod away since then. So the re-usable flash was a real invention and improvement since one didn't have to re-buy those cubes anymore. But don't believe I had thought about that in the 80's already. My reasoning was just the big improvement and not having to buy the cubes anymore.

regards,
HTG

Just came by this Wikipedia entry where they are showing the disc film of this Kodak camera version and thought of this thread again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_film

regards,
HTG