Manuel’s photography-related musings

The Fujipet is quite possibly the cutest camera I have ever seen. Even the name is adorable, and sounds like it should belong to a small furry creature! A leaf-shutter camera with an aluminum and plastic body, the Fujipet was made in Japan—by Fuji Photo Film Company—between 1957 and 1963, and was popular among Japanese teenagers, selling nearly 1 million by 1963. The leaflet advertising the camera contained this English text: “With the Fujipet Camera you can the pictures very easily just as you manipulate your knife and fork. So you are a good photographer from the instant when you have bought the Fujipet Camera. The Fujipet Camera enjoys great popularity among children, mothers and all the members of the family and affords happiness in all homes.” With claims like those, it is truly a bummer that the Fujipet never made its way out of Japan.

Thanks to Flickr, however, we can see some pictures of Fujipets as well as some photos taken by Fujipets.
This is also a really informative site about Fujipets, with lots of great pictures

Lomography is a company that puts out reasonably cheap, trendy cameras that do weird things. LOMO cameras encourage casual, quirky snapshot photography, usually to produce some strange result with a characteristic like over-saturated colors, blurring, skewed images, or a general lo-fi look. Many of my photographer friends burn with hatred for lomography, which is too silly, mindless, or trendy for their tastes. Their motto of “don’t think—just shoot” really offends some of them. I don’t profess to be any sort of photography expert—just a fan, really—and personally, I think lomography cameras are kind of fun, and make photography easy for people who don’t have a background in photography, or would be at a loss if they were put in a darkroom. Here’s a small guide to several LOMO cameras sold today.

The LOMO Pop 9 resembles a brick of gold, and takes—you guessed it—9 repeating frames. Very Andy Warhol. My favorite camera of theirs is probably the LOMO ActionSampler ($30), which has four lenses that capture a subject’s movement within a second. Say, for example, you’re throwing an apple in the air: The first shot would be of you with an apple in hand. In the second shot, the apple would be slightly mid-air, in the third frame it would be further up, and in the fourth, it would be on its way down.