Late every Spring the weather always brings my attention back to capturing digital images. Inevitably, that is already bleeding into the zine work I enjoy.

For years, I’ve been interested in toy digital cameras. The word “toy” is a bit over punctuated, and many of what get called “toy cameras” cost over $100USD. A lot of people gravitate to these as a relationship to film photography. I believe that simply means unpredictability. Shoot now.. be mystified (or disappointed) later. This is counter to the cellphone, where we see the image before we decide if it’s worthy of a few bytes of memory.

For me, it’s a bit different. Most folks understand that the camera is simply a means of content delivery. I believe that the delivery IS the content. The device creates an aesthetic and a message that redefine the content by mixing with it. It does more than a filter; it is part of the content.

For a few weeks, I’ve been working with a toy camera ( The LETSHAHA Instant Print Camera that prints its results onto thermal receipt paper. It’s interesting to shoot with it and then wait a few seconds to see the result. It’s sort of a terrible Polaroid time-warped from the 70s. The shape suggests that its designer knew this.

It must be getting a following or tariffs, because the price has gone up 30% in a few weeks.

My first production with this has been Spoiled: Follow That Man a zine where I take random shots from a 1950s TV show using the LETSHAHA. Later I try to piece the story together from the images and bad memory. The process was a bit cathartic, as my memory capacity is low at best. For zinesters, there is something interesting about treating digital photos as physical objects again.