Cheap Camera Challenge with- a Barbie Camera

Question

For those of you not familiar with the Cheap Camera Challenge, DigitalRev is a site that basically educates photographers. One idea that they try to communicate is that it is not about the equipment, it is about the photographer and their ability to create art from any tool they are given.
They have put toy cameras in the hands of great photographers with amazing results.
This time they handed a competant professional filmmaker a Barbie Camera with a 240p resolution, and told him he had to create a short film. It turned out a little silly and slightly adult themed, but some of the shots are really amazing. Stick around to the end of the video.
You might find this video worth your time.
For more about Philip Bloom, click here.

Answer 1

Years ago the use of cheap film cameras was popular for the same reasons they are used today as expressed in above post.
I guess you could say that the original Kodak Brownie cameras were an inexpensive way for lots of normal people to shoot stuff like vacation pictures and it was easy to do by following the instructions that came with the film and camera.
For a while the " Diana" camera was a popular challenge to artists and even became a fad for a while. The professional photographers would use the cheap Diana camera ( cost about 10 cents ) which was plastic with a plastic lens and was very easy to operate. It had a button you pushed and a leaf would kinda fly through the gate behind the plastic lens ( there was one spring like wire that operated the shutter ).
With film there is often a sheet of paper that comes in the box and it has info on it about how to use the film and process it and stuff like that. There are ( or at least there used to be ) pictures to show people how to expose the film.
Like there was a picture of
1) the sun
2) the sun with cloud
3) a cloud
4) rain
Something like that...
And THEN below each picture was a number ...like F 11, F 8, F 5.6, F 4 ....so basically you looked at the picture and then at the world around you...and matched them.
So if it was sunny out you set your camera lens to F 11.
Pretty simple....yipee !
So that was the " basics " of camera operation...  Now the other thing that was real BASIC was the choice of what to shoot...and how to frame it.  Nothing fancy about the Diana camera.. you basically looked through the platic viewfinder and pointed at something you thought was pretty and pressed the little plastic button.  Then you had to advance the film or else you would stay there forever and just keep getting multiple exposures !!!!  OMG.
I personally used my Diana camera so much that several bad things happened eventually.  For one thing the plastic lens fell off and landed in the dirt one day.  So I had to use elmo's glue and stick it back onto the camera.  That worked out fine.
Then light started leaking into the body through the seams of the plastic door where you load film. So I had to put black paper tape around the seams after loading the film ( which was 120 size ).  That worked out fine too.
To get more " professional " in my experiments with the cheapo camera I started to use a secret method of exposing and developing the film , in order to get a specific " look " in the final prints.  I could do this cause I had my own darkroom and enlarger and all that stuff at the time.
This is black and white now...
Here's the secret.  You overexpose one stop.  That means that if you see a sun shining in the real world, and you see F 11 under the picture of the sun on your film info sheet... you open up one stop to F 8.
This is fun because a person starts to actually THINK about things instead of just using camera features on fancy cameras.
For example, a person learns that from F 11 to F 8 is twice the amount of light. From F 8 to F 5.6 is twice the amount of light too.
With shutter speeds the relationship becomes clear between F stops and shutter speeds.  For example going from 1/250 to 1/125 is twice the amount of time.  Now here's where thinking in your head really gets cool...with cheapo camera.  Let's say a correct exposure is F 8 at 1/60
Cause now a person can see that when letting in half the amount of light ( from F 8 to F 11 ) you can change the shutter to 1/30 and you still have the correct exposure !  The difference is now the DOF from the changed F stop.  So the plot thickens as a cheapo camera teaches us these things if they aren't known already.
The Diana camera made things easier than all that stuff anyway. It only had ONE shutter speed ( I think it was 1/60 , I forget ). So there was no choice about playing with F stops and shutter speeds.
However ( back to my secret overexposure method now ) there is a way to under develop film to accomodate overexposed film... and the chemical used ( developer ) in the case of black and white, has nice paper info sheets telling you all kinds of stuff about the developer, developer times and temperatures and basically tells you so much stuff a normal human would have no interest in at all. It turns out that you can under develop film so that the overexposed film comes out pretty nice. My secret developer was " Rodinol " which is made in some foreign country.
It gives you really grainy negative but sharp images and whites kinda " glow " a little bit... it is really pretty !  Not " soft " as you might think...you sorta have to SEE the print to know what I mean.
All of this stuff has been introduced here in earlier threads and although we are now in the world of digital it is easy to translate the lessons learned on Diana platic still camera ( film ) to the current digital world of still cameras. It can also be applied to motion pictures if a person keeps in mind that the film motion picture camera is based on a 180 degree shutter...
That means at 24 FPS your shutter speed is 1/48th sec.  That is what some people refer to as " the film look ".  Changing F stop and iso and shutter speeds are all related and some of having a good understanding of those things is by using cheapo equipment and doing the thinking on your own. Also, the same basics apply regarding the framing of shots and choice of subject matter.
This image below is from the Diana camera.  I was in a pond when I took that pic, and I used my secret exposure / rodinol method. I was not bit by a snapping turtle , thank gawd.  The Diana camera was not water proof but I bet you $100.00 it would have floated if I dropped it in that pond.
That's the other good thing about cheapo cameras. They are disposable !