Well, this is going to sound crazy, but I turned my Fujifilm X100V into a disposable film camera. No, I didn’t disassemble my digital camera, rip out the sensor, and adapt a film spool. Instead, I configured my X100V to capture pictures that appear as though they were captured with a cheap throwaway film camera. Why? I’ve done crazier things before, including distressing a camera, so it shouldn’t be too shocking that I’d do this—perhaps it was just a matter of time.
The inspiration for this project has been building for awhile. I have a picture displayed on my dresser that’s over 20 years old—it’s my wife and I, captured sometime shortly after we got married. A friend took the picture with a disposable camera. I can tell that it was a Fujifilm QuickSnap camera by the color palette, which is clearly Fujicolor. The picture is special to me because it’s a very personal (and happy) moment that’s been frozen in time through photography. It’s nothing more than a snapshot captured on a cheap camera, and would be completely meaningless to almost anyone else. I have a box full of these type of pictures, mostly 4″ x 6″ prints. You might have a box like this, too—snapshots that are meaningful to you.
Bread Truck – Farmington, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Fujifilm developed the QuickSnap camera, a “one-time-use” 35mm film camera, in the mid-1980’s (Kodak released its version, called FunSaver, a couple years later), and it was an instant hit. These “disposable” cameras were extremely popular in the 1990’s and 2000’s. They came preloaded with 27 frames (a 24-exposure roll of film, but you got three extra shots), and were point-and-shoot. You’d push the shutter-release and advance the film, but otherwise there typically weren’t any other controls, so anyone could use these cameras—no skill required. Once you exposed all of the frames, you’d take the camera to the 1-hour lab, where they removed the film for development and recycled the camera. 60 minutes later you’d have a packet of 4″ x 6″ prints.
Cheap digital point-and-shoots made a dent in disposable camera sales, but it was really the cellphone camera that rendered them obsolete; however, you might be surprised to learn that you can still buy disposable cameras today. Thanks to the Lomography movement and an increased interest in film photography, there’s enough of a market for these cameras to continue to exist in 2022. I briefly considered purchasing one, but instead of that, I decided to capture QuickSnap-like images on my Fujifilm X100V.
Now you know the why, so let’s get into the how.
Note: This was a Creative Collective article, but now it is available to everyone.
I started with research. I discovered that the Fujifilm QuickSnap cameras have a fixed 32mm f/10 lens with focus preset to somewhere near 6 feet. The shutter is permanently set to 1/140. Depending on the unit, the flash is either permanently on or can be powered on-and-off. The film… depends. Nowadays, Superia 400 is what you’ll find in QuickSnap cameras. Superia 800 was also commonly used in these for awhile, but it’s been discontinued for a number of years now. Superia 200 and Superia 1600 had very brief runs in disposable cameras, although they were “specialty” versions: Superia 200 for bright daylight, Superia 1600 for indoors/night. Before Superia, there was Super G Plus, Super HG, Super HR, and probably others. These cameras have no exposure control. Basically, the latitude of the film was the exposure control. Any overexposure and underexposure would be “fixed” when printing. You could overexpose Superia by three stops, arguably four, and still get a usable picture, and underexpose by a stop or maybe two.
The Fujifilm X100V has a full-frame-equivalent 34.5mm focal-length lens, which is slightly less wide-angle than QuickSnap cameras, but pretty close to the 32mm focal-length of the disposable. I figured it was close-enough for this project. I set the aperture to f/10 and the shutter to 1/160, as 1/140 wasn’t an option (I could have alternatively used 1/125). I set ISO to Auto, up to ISO 6400. The X100V doesn’t have the same exposure latitude of the film, so it was important to have some level of exposure control. In bright daylight conditions, I activated the ND filter to prevent overexposure (I programmed the ND filter to the Fn button on the top, as an On/Off switch). The Exposure Compensation Dial was set to +1/3. I manually focused to six-and-a-half feet and left it there. I set the flash to be be On (TTL +1/3), and let it fire on every exposure.
For the film simulation recipe, I went with Fujicolor Superia 800, except that I set Sharpness to -4, Grain to Strong Small, and the White Balance Shift to be -1 Red & -2 Blue. This seemed to be a pretty close match to the prints I was hoping to mimic the aesthetic of.
The X100V’s lens is too sharp and flawless to mimic a cheap one-time-use camera, so I needed some help. I used a 10% CineBloom filter to take the digital edge off of the pictures, and also a UV filter that just so happened to have a thin layer of dust on it (not sure if the dust made a difference or not, but I figured it was worth trying). I briefly considered very lightly sandpapering a UV lens, but decided against that, just because I didn’t want to ruin the filter without knowing whether it would work or not.
I wanted it to be a disposable camera experience, so, after I got the camera set, I disabled the rear screen and the electronic viewfinder, and used only the optical viewfinder. I turned off all of the display information (except for the ND filter, because I wanted to know if it was On or Off). With everything set, I went out and captured 27 exposures!
I didn’t review any of the pictures until after all 27 images were captured. I had no idea what the pictures would look like until the project was complete. The only controls I used were the shutter-release and the ND filter—it really was a point-and-shoot experience, with aperture, shutter, focus, and flash all preset.
Here are my 27 exposures captured using my X100V-as-a-disposable-camera:
Frame 01
Frame 02
Frame 03
Frame 04
Frame 05
Frame 06
Frame 07
Frame 08
Frame 09
Frame 10
Frame 11
Frame 12
Frame 13
Frame 14
Frame 15
Frame 16
Frame 17
Frame 18
Frame 19
Frame 20
Frame 21
Frame 22
Frame 23
Frame 24
Frame 25
Frame 26
Frame 27
I think some of these shots are very convincing as disposable camera images. If I had them made into 4″ x 6″ prints, I could probably trick some people into thinking I actually used a QuickSnap camera. To that end, I think this project was a success. More importantly, I had fun. I really appreciated not seeing the pictures until the end—I might use the optical viewfinder more often, and keep the rear screen off.
The biggest challenge was keeping track of the exposures. I used the notes section (under the recipe) in the Fuji X Weekly App to help remember, but that wasn’t ideal, and I ended up going over by one, thinking that it was the 27th frame when it was actually the 28th. If I do this again, I’ll have to figure out a better method.
I think you could do this technique with any camera, but the JPEG tools, built-in flash, ND filter, and optical viewfinder make the X100V particularly ideal for this. I tried a few shots on my X-T30 using a kit zoom and the Kodak Gold 200 recipe, and it seemed to do alright, but it wasn’t the same experience as the X100V. If you don’t own an X100V, I invite you to try this on whichever Fujifilm camera you do own. You might just discover something fun, and capture some meaningful moments in the process.
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Duskflower – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V – captured during daylight.
I love photographing during the “blue hour” of dusk and dawn. The time right before sunrise and just after sunset, called twilight, is great for photography. While it’s called the blue hour, twilight is technically closer to an hour-and-a-half, but for practical photographic purposes, you have around 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening where the light is great for capturing pictures, so an hour total each day. That’s a small window of opportunity that’s easy to miss.
There are challenges to blue hour photography because the available light is limited and constantly changing. You’re using slow shutter speeds, large apertures and high ISOs. Or you are lugging around a tripod. These aren’t necessarily “bad things” they’re simply a part of blue hour photography, but there is an alternative that eliminates these challenges.
You can do faux blue hour photography anytime of the day with your Fujifilm X100V. It’s a simple trick, really. It requires three things: underexposure, warm high-shutter-speed flash, and a white balance adjustment. With a little slight-of-hand—I mean, technical knowhow—you can create pictures that appear to have been captured during the blue hour but are in fact daytime images.
The first thing you’ll need to do is underexposure your pictures by at least 3 stops from what the meter says that it should be. Most of the pictures that I captured required the exposure to be adjusted to -3 2/3 to -4 1/3, which means you’ll have to go manual, since the exposure compensation dial only goes to -3. You are basically setting the luminance of the background in your pictures, and you want it to be dark. It can be tough to judge in the moment what the exact exposure should be, and it takes a little trial-and-error to get it right, so be patient, as it might take a few tries to get an image that you’re happy with.
Next is the flash, which you’ll use to illuminate the foreground of your pictures. Because you are photographing during daylight, you’ll be using a fast shutter. I typically used a shutter speed between 1/500 and 1/4000, just depending on the picture, which would be a problem for most cameras when combined with flash photography, but on the X100V it’s no problem whatsoever. You see, the X100V’s mechanical shutter is a leaf shutter, which means that you can use the flash at high shutter speeds (something that you cannot do with a focal plane shutter). The X100V’s built-in fill-flash does marginally work for this, but I got much better results when using the EF-X500 shoe-mount flash. I taped a DIY yellow “gel” (plastic that I cut off of a pear bag that was semi-transparent and yellow) to the flash to make the foreground warmer.
White balance is the third key to this trick. While it varies depending on the exact light, I found that 2500K with a shift of +5 Red and +9 Blue produced good results. Basically, you’ll want the white balance to be very cool, and you’ll need it to be 3200K at the warmest, which will likely will be a tad too warm.
Here are some examples comparing pictures shot normal and pictures shot with this faux blue hour trick:
The difference is huge! The normal daylight and the faux blue hour versions of the pictures above look dramatically dissimilar from each other, even though they were captured only seconds apart. This little trick produces convincing results!
The settings that I used for most of my faux blue hour pictures are:
Classic Chrome Dynamic Range:DR400 Highlight: -1 to +1 Shadow: -2 to 0 Color: -2 to +2 Sharpness: -3 Noise Reduction: -4 Color Chrome Effect: Off Color Chrome Effect Blue: Strong Grain: Weak, Large Clarity: -2 White Balance: 2500K, +5 Red & +9 Blue ISO: 640 Flash: On, with yellow “gel” Exposure: -3 2/3 to -4 1/3 (typically)
This isn’t a film simulation recipe, so I didn’t strictly stick with one set of settings, but instead looked at each exposure individually. Still, all of my faux blue hour pictures had similar settings, and I didn’t stray very far from it.
Even though this technique is a great way to achieve a blue hour look, there are some limitations. First, you might have shadows that don’t make sense for an after-sunset image. Second, there won’t be any lights on, such as streetlamps, car lights and indoor lights, which you’d expect to find after dark. If you want to use a slow shutter speed, you’ll need to activate the built-in ND filter, but you won’t likely get it to be as slow as you would if it were actually twilight. While the shoe-mounted flash does a decent job of lighting the foreground, you’d likely get even better results if you used strobes or off-camera flashes, but that further complicates the situation.
Despite the limitations, the technique of underexposure, warm flash, and cool white balance makes for convincing blue hour images in daylight conditions. While these settings are intended for the Fujifilm X100V, they can be applied to any camera with a leaf shutter—because of the fast shutter speeds you’ll be using, the leaf shutter is the real key to this trick. Below are out-of-camera JPEGs made using this faux blue hour technique on my X100V camera during daylight.
Night Reeds – Farmington, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Shark Boy – Farmington, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Red Tree Berries – Farmington, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Changing Oak – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V
September Autumn – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Night Trunk – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Night Trees – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Sunflowers at Night – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V
Bridge Under Moonlight – Bountiful, UT – Fujifilm X100V
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