Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000
From: "David Foy" [email protected]
Newsgroups: rec.photo.advanced
Subject: The Zen of Subminiature Cameras (crossposted to rec.photo groups)

I've decided to use this means of passing along some information about a branch of photography that is hugely rewarding and enormously fun -- particularly because you get very high quality at very low cost -- but which does not yet have its own newsgroup. I ask you to forgive me for cross-posting. I think in this case it's worthwhile.

You may have run across these pretty little orphans at garage sales, flea markets, and eBay, or covered with dust in the far corners of pawn shops and camera stores. They're often no bigger than a box of 35mm film, and never so big you couldn't put them in a shirt pocket. They go for a few bucks at garage sales, and not much more at dealers and on eBay.

They are plentiful as cameras go. In the period roughly from 1950 to 1975 they were widely manufactured, available not only in camera stores but also from catalogue merchants like Sears Roebuck. A lot of them came home from occupied Japan and, later, from Vietnam. Some of them were sold mail order from the back pages of comic books, and for that reason most people who have some vague memory of that consider them little more than exotic, difficult toys.

In fact many of these are excellent cameras, precision instruments with wonderful lenses, capable of first-rate photographic results on a wide range of color and black and white films.

Look closely at the brand names of some of them -- Minolta, Mamiya, Yashica, Ricoh. These were expensive, high-quality cameras at the time, priced higher than many good contemporary 35mm cameras. Consider the Minolta subminis with their four-element Rokkor lenses, or the wonderful Kodak Pocket Instamatic 60, with it's incredible f2.7 Ektar lens and precise exposure automation. Or the fabulous Canon 110 ED. Lenses don't get much better than this, in any format.

When the 110 format was introduced, the production of the earlier submini cameras, and the film they used, ceased. The special film cartridges needed for reloading your own film went out of production. Processing became hard to find. As a result most people in 1975 would have said the subminiature formats were dead. 110 took over, and the early submini boom appeared to be dying.

But the fact is, subminiature photography is anything but dead. In fact, it may be starting to boom again.

Using subminis requires a little extra effort (but then high quality at extremely low cost is worth a little effort). Some submini cameras use obsolete batteries, but there are usually easy workarounds. Finding film cartridges is not impossible (I've accumulated ten in two years), and you really only need one.

Reloading film cartridges by hand is dead simple -- you use a 20-inch length of ordinary 16mm movie film in a changing bag. In fact, for most of them you don't need a cartridge -- the camera can be its own cartridge -- just load the bare film into the camera in a changing bag. Processing is no problem either. You transfer the exposed film to an empty 35mm cartridge, leave the tongue hanging out, take it to any one-hour lab that can process and print 110 film, and hand it to them in person explaining what you have and what you want done.

Or of course you can use your own darkroom. No 16mm or Minox-sized processing reels? No problem. Tape your submini film emulsion side out to a previously processed length of 35mm film, piggyback, and thread it onto a 35mm reel. Believe me, it works just fine.

There are three wonderful aspects of subminiature photography.

One, it's dead cheap. The cameras rarely cost more than $5 to $50 ($7-$25 is typical on eBay), and this amount of money gets you the quality and precision of a company like Minolta, Mamiya, or Yashica. For around $100 - $150 (often much less) you can own a very fine submini with electronic exposure control, or a fine Ricoh Steky with a normal and a telephoto lens, or a good little workhorse Minox B. Short lengths of 16mm color and b/w film (and grainless microfilm) are available from suppliers like Goat Hill for next to nothing. A 100-ft roll of b/w movie film (FP4 or HP5, for instance) will last forever and is very cheap. And of course Minox film and processing is available in most cities, or by mail.

Two, you can make photographs of extraordinary quality. Many of these cameras have multi-element lenses of such precision that a negative smaller than a fingernail routinely produce grainless 4x6 prints that rival 35mm. And if you take the time to really learn the system, you can make very credible 8x10 enlargements. Some people make 16x20 and 20x24 prints of their most exceptional negatives, but of course that is like making mural-size prints from 35mm, and not every negative is up to it. The truly dedicated use microfilm and make beautiful prints at huge degrees of enlargement.

Three, it's enormously fun. The spontaneous, intimate photos of people that we all want just seem to come naturally when the photographer is using a camera that's half the size of a bar of soap. And you can walk all day with a pocket full of photographic dynamite and never notice the weight, which makes for a happier, more creative, more spontaneous and inventive photographic artist.

If you don't believe what I say about quality, I invite you to spend a few minutes at this wonderful web site:

http://www.slonet.org/~dkrehbie/

And of course if you have even the slightest interest, the Sub Club is something you must not miss:

http://members.aol.com/xkaes/index.htm

The Sub Club offers a full range of information, on cameras, reloading, processing, film, on-line galleries, etc etc and links to commercial suppliers and processing services.

David Foy
(Minolta 16mm fan -- Minox too. But *really* into the Yashica subminis.)