I recently saw one of my teachers using a funky/cute little camera that spit out little credit-card sized instant photos. My curiosity was piqued so I scoured the web to figure what this camera was. It was a Fujifilm Cheki 25 from their “Instax” series. A trip to Bic-Camera and a few thousand yen later, I had one of my own.
You may ask, “Lauren, you have a perfectly good 8mp digital camera. Why on earth do you want an instant camera that takes fuzzy little pictures that looks like they’re from the 70s?” Actually, the retro look is half the appeal for me. There’s something about the high contrast colors, slightly blurred shapes and fishlensy quality that my catch-every-painful-detail digital camera doesn’t match. And that’s another thing, while you can check a digital photo imediately, delete the bad ones, and Photoshop the decent ones, it can’t duplicate the experience of taking an instant picture and watch it develop right before your eyes.
But I think what truely drove me to buy an instant camera was fact that it delivers me a photo to hold. In these days where I’m much more likely to get an email rather than a letter, buy music from iTunes rather a CD from a store, or look at friends photo’s on Facebook rather than in a photo album, I just really love being able to hold the little photos with thick, white borders in my hands.
Okay, enough of all this, let’s look at the Cheki Photos!
I love this! That’s so awesome that you got one. I’m trying to convince Adam to let you find one for me b/c I think it’d be great …. so we’ll see. But definitely enjoy it, Retro’ie photos rock!