I love playing around with new equipment and seeing what I can do with it. However, I don’t have that much money so most of the time I buy really cheap ~$15-$30 toy cameras and have fun with those. Does anyone have any extremely cheap “bad” hardware that they’ve had fun taking photos with?
Probably not as cheap, but some of the Chinese lenses made by AstrHori and others can be fun to experiment with if we don’t have thousands of spare dollars in our pocket. I recently bought a 85mm tilt macro by AstrHori which was a fraction of the cost of the Genuine Canon tilt macro, My initial impression is I have made a good purchase.
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If you are looking for interesting effects, get a bunch of cheapo UV filters and put stuff on them. Vaseline has a long history in cinema and portraiture, but you can also glue on a few pieces of glass or plastic to make a caleidoscope-like effect (kind of like a DIY version of this filter from PolarPro). Basically anything mostly transparent will work, just experiment, the worst case scenario is that you have wasted a cheap uv filter.
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I recently bought this “toy” film camera on eBay for a few pounds sold as spares or repairs/display prop from a random junk shop seller. But actually it seems to work fine, which I thought it might as it’s extremely basic and I figured they just didn’t understand how it works. Supposedly the glass lens is quite good. Not that it will be that cheap when I have to run film through it…
There’s a nice video on it here:
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My favourite is a small Sony point and shoot that I removed the uv filter from. Now it’s a decent little infrared camera. Paid $10 for it at a thrift store.
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I think the best bet is to use a modern MILC and buy vintage or cheap chinese lenses. You get all of the old/film character without getting into big expenses or buying disposable items that will end up in the trash polluting the world even more.
Tamas advice with filters is a good one as well.
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Is there a model number I can look up?