it…out

Lindsey recently acquired a box of old cameras from an ad in the paper.  Among them was a Ninoka nk-700.

I initially mistook it for a Nikon, but after some goggling (there’s a mini-review here), I found that this camera is usually referred to as a “toy camera.”  While it sort of looks SLR-ish, it’s not at all.  Rotating the lens doesn’t zoom or focus anything, but it does adjust the aperture to one of four settings.  It also sports a 50mm glass lens.  As you can see from the picture, it came with a flash, which after popping in four AA batteries worked like a charm. 

When we first got it both the viewfinder and the lens were covered with dust and dirt. I cleaned it up with some glass cleaner and noticed that it still had film in it  I took it in to be developed, but wasn’t able to rewind the film.  One of the photo techs took it into a darkroom and opened it up and looked around inside and saw that the film was stuck — wound very tightly.  It wasn’t salvageable, so I cut it out with a knife.  It turned out to be very brittle so I don’t know if they could have developed it anyway had we been able to rewind it. 

Having no mystery photos to develop, I decided to take some of my own.  I bought a 12 exposure roll of regular 35mm film for it.  I don’t remember the last time I bought film, but it was a long long  time ago.  $2 for 12 shots?  And they have to be at 400 ISO?  And I have to wait until I shoot the whole roll to see them?  And development is another couple bucks?  Maybe shooting digital for 6 years has spoiled me, but this sounded like a pain in the neck.  Still, I want to see what kind of pictures the Ninoka can produce.

It turns out taking pictures with “toy” cameras isn’t as far-fetched an idea as you might think.  In fact I’ve learned that cameras like this can have a near-religious following in the photography community.  For example, the Holga has a very strong presence on flickr, and a few shots in this month’s JPG Magazine were taken with Holgas.  The nk-700 enjoys less fame than that, but there are a few discussions about it on flickr as well.

I’ve taken a few shots so far.  I’ll post the results when I shoot all 12.