Taken sometime around 2010 with a Beirette VSN 2 35 mm camera which was once sold in Boots drugstores. It was a great little 35 mm snapshot camera which, although generally considered to be a “toy camera” because of the very cheap plastic build, was equipped with a real focusing lens and traditional aperture and shutter speed controls. That put it a big step above the disposable cameras you could have found next to it on the shelf. Of course, unlike those, you had to use the guess-o-matic method of setting aperture and focus. Unfortunately, I dropped it on a concrete floor just as I was about to start exposing a second roll of film, and the rewind knob broke off. Luckily, unlike the latest digital flagship and bagful of gold-trimmed lenses guys, I only paid $5 for it.
Of course, this isn’t about serious pro image quality. For me, the fun of toy film cameras like the Beirette was always just to see what I could get with them without being too pretentious about the subject matter. In a sense though, the pictures always end up more interesting and meaningful to me.
