Pop!

Earlier this year I bought three compact 35mm cameras for a couple of quid each at a camera fair. One of them was the Konica Pop with which I took the photos in today’s post.

The Pop is a pretty bare-bones machine. Essentially the only options you have are altering the film speed setting and deciding whether to manually use flash (it fires automatically if there’s low light, popping up from the top of the camera, hence – I suppose – the name). Mine, however, doesn’t do this as there were a couple of badly corroded batteries in it when I bought it and the electrics no-longer work.

However, after a bit of research, I discovered that it’s possible to shoot it manually using Sunny 16 type guidelines. The camera has a fixed 1/125sec shutter speed, and the lens is fixed focus (at 2.8 metres). The aperture though can be controlled by an odd combination of the film ASA setting and whether the flash is set in it’s up or down position and provides a decent set of apertures to use:

ASA 400 & Flash Down = f/16
ASA 200 & Flash Down = f/11
ASA 100 & Flash Down = f/8
ASA 200 & Flash Up = f/5.6
ASA 100 & Flash Up = f/4

It’s a bit ‘Heath Robinson’, but it works. Based on this, I decided to run a roll of film through it to see what I results I might get. Now, some of the shots were a little underexposed based on my misjudging the light, but on the whole they weren’t too bad, with the Hexanon f/4 lens being pretty decent.

So today’s post features a small selection of the better shots. All were shot on Agfa Vista Plus 200 film, a few of which I converted to black and white in Lightroom. I’ll get around to re-scanning them at some point and hopefully squeeze a bit of extra detail out of the negatives.