The Gelto was a Japanese camera made by Toa Koki in 1936-1937, 1943, and after the war until 1952. It takes 3×4 centimeter pictures on 127 film and has a great die-cast body with angled edges. I’ll be honest: I don’t know too much about the thing, and when you type Gelto into ebay it asks if you mean “gelato.” I don’t own one, but wouldn’t mind if somebody wanted to buy me a Gelto for Christmas. I suspect it might be perfect for all the still photography I’ve been getting into lately.
Archive for December, 2006
G-E-L-T-O – it’s alive!
Origami camera
PaperCams have got to be the simplest, most straightforward cameras on the face of the planet. All you have to do to assemble this “camera” is fold a piece of photographic paper into a cube shape, and then tape it shut. This particular artist, Thomas Hudson Reeve, has some images on this website. He uses 11×14 inch photo paper, some tape, and a brass plate, all of which he constructs in the dark; He compares his paper cam to making a salad and eating from a lettuce leaf bowl. There is no lettuce remaining after you finish the salad, just as there is no camera remaining after you finish taking the photo. Basically, as Thomas Hudson Reeve puts it, “There is no machine.” Very cool.
Shake it like a Polaroid picture
I like to think of Polaroid cameras as the precursor to digital cameras. Film cameras required a lot of time and patience: you used to have to shoot your entire roll of film before developing. Nowadays, digital cameras allow you take a picture and get to see right away if one of your subjects accidentally blinked or looked away. But Polaroid cameras were providing instant gratification long before digital cameras appeared on the scene. With their automatically developing exposures, there was no need to wait for a whole roll of film to be taken and then processed. The earliest instant camera was the Land Camera, invented by American scientist Edwin Land (who was also the inventor of inexpensive filters for polarizing light) in 1947. Polaroids come in a number of sizes and shapes, though the most popular is perhaps the 600 series cameras—Pronto, Sun 600, and One600—that use 600 film.
There are (and continue to be) other sizes of course: Spectra cameras produce rectangular photos. I-Zone cameras were introduced in 1999 and produced much smaller sticker pictures. They were quite inexpensive and lightweight, and came in many different colors to target a much younger crowd.
A really popular thing lately seems to be arty fun with Polaroids. One example that comes readily to mind is Darwin Bell is a San Francisco-based artist with a project called “Sign Language.” He photographs signs all over the city and puts them back together to form sentences. Experimenting with Polaroids is a really popular thing to do these days. One neat thing to do with Polaroids is a Polaroid emulsion transfer: by “cooking” a Polaroid in hot water until the image separates from the paper, you can take the image and put it onto another surface. Another thing you can do is peel the image from the backing about a minute and a half after the image develops and then smoosh, scratch, and smear the picture to your heart’s content.
I love my Polaroid camera, which my mother gave to me when I was sixteen. The only problem I have with Polaroid cameras in general is that the film is so expensive. Usually you can buy in bulk online—from eBay or Amazon—at a rate that is slightly cheaper than in stores.
