Out of focus pictures have always been a major problem with film any point & shoot camera. Unlike an SLR with the ability to give you a preview of the final result, with a compact camera, in-focus pictures rely heavily on the autofocus mechanism. While the autofocus system in compact cameras has gotten better over time, mis-focusing is still unfortunately inevitable.
I’m now shooting a Minolta Riva Zoom 110 point & shoot film camera – I want to tell you the story of how I came to choose this camera, and how well it has worked out for me.
Before the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK began, I was casually shooting what had started to become a bit of a project. In reality, it’s little more than me loading Lomography Metropolis film into a Minolta Riva Panorama camera and taking fairly random photos – but for me personally, it became a little more than that.
Summertime is the best time for cheap point-and-shoot cameras for me. Stuff em with some color film, throw em in a pocket, go on vacation, take pictures, have fun. I don’t want to fuss with focus or exposure, I don’t want to worry about losing or breaking them, I just want to seamlessly capture images of my family and our adventures. Last summer I decided to run a little shootout to discover which cameras I liked shooting best and which ones had the best images. I really only considered cameras available for $100 or less and here’s what I came up with.
Earlier this year I decided to start taking analog photography more seriously. I work in Television (for money), and independently, I produce documentaries and short films. I was looking to analog photography as a way to sharpen my eye for composition and to broaden my understanding of exposure. For years I’ve taken snaps with my father’s Canon AV-1 which he bought new in 1979, but I was never very rigorous in my approach to photography.
