In 2017 I had a dream where I was running around with a point-and-shoot camera and having a lot of fun with it. The next day I checked which camera Wirecutter recommended and ordered a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX10 on Amazon. (It was a different time.)
In 2024 I was walking around Tokyo with Amy and thinking about photography. I hadn't brought my Panasonic because it's a little heavy, and takes a while to boot, and it's a little awkward to use with its screen-only viewfinder, and I never really learned how all its settings work. Amy carries a film camera from time to time, an old Yashica she bought on eBay before we met. The ceremony of taking a photo now and seeing whether it's any good later is attractive to me; I take plenty of photos with my phone and they end up on iCloud and/or Dropbox and/or wherever and I generally forget about them. I wonder whether I'd enjoy a Camp Snap, the toyish, faux-retro digital camera without a screen. It's appealing, but I put a lot of value in having a GPS location associated with every photo I take on my phone.
In 2025 I decided the GPS stuff didn't really matter, and I like getting new toys. So with a second trip to Japan on the way, I bought a Camp Snap. I started carrying it around my neighborhood to get a feel for it. It's a little clunky, but that's kind of the point. It also weighs next to nothing. The photos are not good per se, and half of them come out too blurry or the thing I was trying to photograph is half out-of-frame because the viewfinder doesn't line up with the lens well enough, but they have an undeniable charm.
I took 200 photos in Japan with this thing. I peeked at them on my laptop every few days, to remember where we'd just been and make sure it was still working. Many are underexposed or out of focus or off-kilter, but the fuzziness serves to jog my memory to a nice place I visited. Money well spent! I'll be publishing a lot of those photos on this website in the next few days and you can check them out then if you want to.
If you're curious, here's an example photo, unedited except to resize and compress for the web. Here's the original, straight off the SD card. It uses the Kino filter from Camp Shades; you can upload a custom filter file to the camera and that filter is automatically applied to every photo taken at the moment it's saved. There's no original unfiltered image file. It's just this. I find that the filter adds a nice personality, and the pre-processing takes even more pressure off of me to get a "perfect" shot.