I love my Hedgehog.

I’ve been a semi-okay photographer since falling in love with the process back in high school. But even before I was developing my own film, I was a snapshot junkie. In primary school, my parents gave me a 110 camera – remember those? The film was in a cartridge that snapped into the back of the camera. The quality wasn’t great, and I was happy to upgrade to a 35mm as soon as I could, eventually getting a vintage Ricoch just before I went to the UK in 98. I love my SLR very much, but these days it’s just a pain in the arse to be taking film in to be developed. I still shoot film from time to time, just not as often.

I’m an overshooter anyway. I enjoy digital because you can take 20 shots to make sure you get THE shot with no hardship in deleting the other 19. My newest higher end digital gives me almost 2000 high quality shots on an 8gig card – so I have plenty of room to shoot to my hearts content.

But! I do miss film. And I miss the low-fi results from a non aligned viewfinder. Ages ago I was hunting around for a digital camera that gave the same results as the toy cameras which are currently popular. There wasn’t anything then, but when my photojojo newsletter came in to announce the Zumi, I ordered it right away.

The proper name for the Zumi camera is the Digital Harinezumi, which apparently means Hedgehog. It differs from standard digital cameras in 3 special ways. First difference, there’s no way to line your shot up perfectly. It has a small plastic flip up viewfinder which will give you a general idea of what you might be aiming at. Focus and framing are in the laps of the gods. The second difference is that the LCD screen only shows basic information while you compose your shot (no picture) and gives you a glimpse of the image once you’ve taken it. I’ve turned that off however, bit worried about chewing through my battery. You CAN review your images, delete them etc from the card. I’ve not done that either.

The third difference is that the camera has built in picture imperfections. Colours saturate, whites blow out, lights flare and film grain covers all. Check out these I took today (they’re on Flickr if you want to embiggen them):

Frankly, I love my little camera. I love that it’s tiny, I love that I can’t possibly know if I’m getting a great shot or a dud till I upload it. I even love that sometimes my finger ends up in frame. The shape resembles the 110 film cartridges of my youth, and the random snappyness reminds me of that old camera. The one thing that slightly worries me is that after taking 75 shots today, I’d dropped a battery charge line. Until I can get a hold of a charger and matching batteries, that’s going to worry me some.

A friend of mine, when shown the link to the camera (before I got it) said “You know you can get the same effects in Picasa?”. it’s sort of true. You can take a photo you’ve snapped with a “better” digital, mess around with it for a while and get sort of the same effect, but for me the fun is NOT knowing what the final shot will be. I love to line up photos, don’t get me wrong, but just aiming in a general direction and pressing the shutter button is very very freeing and delicious good fun.