Certainly not the best photo I've ever taken but felt I should post one of those surprise cross-processed Spartus Full-Vue pics from World Toy Camera Day.

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My guy was profiled on PhotoJunkie. He's growing up (right before my eyes).

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Two New Cameras

The Houay (or Howay. Not sure which) Anny-35 camera. It's a plastic lens 35mm camera Made in Japan. I was expecting a light, plastic thing but it is actually quite heavy with metal parts. It's kind of like the designers kept changing their minds when they designed it. It's made to look like a Russian Rangefinder, and is even sort of weighty like one, but then it has this shitty plastic lens that easily screws off revealing all the inner workings of the camera. The film counter is manual and the ASA dial is fake. Bizarre but highly entertaining. I also love the styling of the "35" on the orange background.

My second arrival came this morning. It's an Agfa Pioneer. The good news is I only paid 3 bucks for it. The bad news is I was expecting a 620 film camera and the one I got is the 616 model. Well, 616 film is much taller in spool size than 120 or 620. The film is also impossible to get. Developing a roll costs 20 bucks U.S. No thanks. So I spent about an hour this morning searching online for possible solutions. I found one. I can't show a photo because the film is in the camera already but basically I used those plastic plugs you use to stick in the wall for hanging stuff as extenders. I just cut them down a bit to size and stuffed them into the ends of 120 spools. Okay it was slightly more complicated than that... I'll post instructions someday. But it works like a charm. The cool thing is I read that the resized 120 film gives the correct aspect ratio of a panoramic image so I now have a makeshift 120 panoramic.

I was not expecting the size of this camera. It's HUGE. It really is a box camera refashioned into a different shape with a big lens stuck on the front. It has two shutter speeds, regular and 'B', and what looks like plugs for a flash unit on the top. That's it. There are no other features.