Social Life of Information

My advisor at Michigan is responsible for my foray into 16mm photography. When he learned that I was using vintage cameras, he handed me his father’s WWII Mamiya Super-16, a superb piece of subminiature photographic engineering. I found the film available through eBay seller subtimes in handmade epoxy reproduction cartridges, and a daylight developing tank with a reel that would go down to the 16mm size at the A2 Kiwanis sale for $0.50. So I gave it a shot. The negatives were tiny!

16mm cameras are the classic “spy” cameras of yesteryear. They had their strongest following decades ago, and while they are compact and convenient, they failed to standardize on a film cartridge style. Each camera manufacturer made their own proprietary film cartridge, constraining the supply of the essential material that would have extended the era of these small cameras. As a result of these and doubtless other market forces, 16mm cameras became obsolete, used only by afficianados and photography geeks, and rarely at that. There’s still a small but interested market for the instruments, as a Mamiya Super-16 in good condition is a rare find and can command a respectable price, given that it’s a collector’s item for almost any buyer.

My friends saw me using a 16mm camera, and over the last year, they gifted me two Minolta subminis. Mark gave me the ultra-basic Model-P, a 16mm point-and-shoot camera with a powder blue plastic carrying case. Ross presented me with an MG-S, which is a bit fancier; it’s got several whizzy accessories, including shiny chrome plumb-bobs that correlate to focus distance, close-up and color filters still in their original cellophane wrappings, and even unused flashbulbs for the flash unit!

The fellow on eBay also sells Minolta-style reproduction cartridges loaded with fresh film, so one batch of five rolls will feed both Minolta submini cameras for awhile. I’m very slow to use the film because it’s a bit costly, but actually nowhere near the current cost of Polaroid exposures, come to think of it. I’ve actually only used one roll of film in each, and haven’t even tried out the whizzy accessories for the MG-S just yet! I’ve also been sent some “original” film from an estate sale, courtesy of Mark, which is a good 20-odd years expired and should make a fun experiment. Some of that film is actually color film, but I’ve located several places that handle C-41 16mm film processing by mail order. Supposedly any photofinisher that can handle 110 film can also do 16mm, though I’m not sure I would trust people who don’t explicitly state a capability for processing 16mm film. The film isn’t too hard to get, and developing isn’t much trouble if you stick with black and white and do it yourself.

Scanning the negatives is actually the biggest nuisance for me; they’re too small to work in the film-holding cartridges that my scanner uses, but without a frame of some sort to keep them off the platen, the negatives will scan with unsightly Newton’s rings. My work-around is to tape a piece of archival photo sleeve in the 120 size cartridge, and insert the 16mm negatives in there for scanning. It’s not a particularly elegant or even fully functional solution; if I lose tension on the sleeve taped into the cartridge, I still end up with Newton’s rings, and if I reuse the archival sleeve too many times, it gets scratches that are quite apparent (and also unsightly) in the scans. Nonetheless, the process works reasonably well, or at least well enough to prevent me from coming up with an alternative.

The 16mm cameras make a great travel camera; they’re compact, easy to operate, and uncomplicated. The images bear the mark of an uncommon camera; the tiny negatives don’t have the same sharpness of their larger counterparts, so the photos tend to have a softened, dream-like quality that I actually quite like for travel photography. I can print out my scans from the negatives just like any others, and recently had MOO postcards made using one of them. It’s an image I particularly like, taken in the Getty Center gardens in Los Angeles during the iConference reception, when two colleagues and I were exploring the gardens in the gloaming.