8 posts tagged “fujifilm”
Whether it is digital or analog, mini cameras are the most trendy thing happening in the industry. Digital Minox, Rollei, Diana mini, Digital Harinezumi (just released new white edition), etc. They are all in this tiny little promotion happening in Festival Walk and APM LOG-ON.
And yes we are including the Olympus E-P1 too coz it is somewhat a smaller version of SLR. If you missed the chance to grab a Lomo mini camera keychain packaged in beautifully printed film cans, they are now back in stock, talking about 20% the size of the actual camera (hmmm, I did say they are keychains, not real cameras).
Most of us are bored by the strap came with our cameras right, so we've been collecting from Korea and Japan some of the nicest straps ever produced and some of them are here, the rest will be coming to the stores this year.
Friends from Lomo, Superheadz and Fujifilm gave us some very nice supports including some left over film canisters, cute POP and displays, etc and I feel thankful for their generosity and help. Superheadz even shipped from Japan a dozen foam boards printed with versions of the lovely Russian girl character.
One of the pink display took me a few hours to create using films, MT tapes and various products from other departments. If you have time, please do visit these two stores and see if they are still intact :) This promotion lasts for 2 weeks from now on. Hope you like it and able to find some inspirations from it. Check out the Flickr photo set of this promotion.
Note: thanks Martin for the hard work. Get well soon Moon.
This year marks the third year of an interesting event to be held in city'super and LOG-ON. In this concept cafe (particularly in Festival Walk's LOG-ON), you will find:
- Stationery and photography travel gears (19th June - 2nd July 2009): Canon, Fuji, Lomo, Moleskine, Midori, KOLO, MT-tapes, LUXE, Kodomo stamps, Staz-on inkpads, etc
- Travel Talks: 3 different sessions on 20th June 2009 presented by traveler and photographers. Learn how to steal time and write better on your journal, life hack tricks included. Why a trip to Cambodia changed a portrait photographer's view on life and how a traveler's mindset is different from a tourist's. How imagery and text combined can create lasting memory through photo journaling. Only a few days left for registration!
- Mini Game with interesting prizes: Follow the instruction on the postcard and go to Festival Walk LOG-ON store, find the hidden message which is a travel quote written by G.K. Chesterton, write it down and submit. You get a chance to win nice gifts from great brands (check out this Flickr photo and move your mouse over to see what they are)
- Stamp your notebook/postcard: Yes stamps, bring your notebook or use our postcard. I've made these icons into self inking stamps for your fun: Moleskine, LCA, Travel Cafe logo, fountain pen. They sort of summarized what this event is all about. Also, Designphil (Midori) in Japan made these two stamps for our event too! They are only available in Hong Kong during this period, so collect them while you can!
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Enjoy!
My friend Kelvin couldn't resist the temptation of Polapremium's big discount on the "Polaroid Pogo Moleskine Special Edition" and despite the not so good reviews all over the net, I said "count me in" knowing that I will need a real small photo printer for my travel journals. We both regretted on the day we received the package.
The price is amazingly attractive. A PoGo alone costs US$80 to $150, but Polapremium is selling this special set at US$72, you get a free Moleskine too. I love both brands and the packaging is great. The size of it is a little bigger than an iPhone and about double the thickness of an iPhone. The first thing I did was to charge it up but to my surprise the power socket on PoGo is kind of shaky probably because of it not being soldered to the circuit board strong enough by design. The power button on the machine is hard to press and located right beside the USB cable which is very inconvenient. After more than 6 hours of charging, the printer printed 6 photos and the battery indicator became red and refused to print another one. Yeah I know, I was warned about battery life but this is not portable at all.
Print quality.... totally unacceptable. It looks like a result of laser print out (you can actually see the contours of color layers especially in dark areas), but resolution of an inkjet (I know, I'm not able to describe it properly but this is how I feel). You can also see faint white vertical lines every 3mm on the print, not a good sight as a photo. The paper gives you an impression of cheap labels instead of a photo print with glue on the back. I cannot find any information about the acidity of the paper and glue.
I know these are pretty crude comments, considering the amazing zero ink technology by Zink behind this. I think it has great potential, just that both the paper and the machine are not mature enough to give end user a good photo print coz it is natural for us to compare print quality with a lab or a typical photo printer despite high admiration of its technology behind. I love the size, bluetooth printing and pictbridge support. I hate the battery and print quality. For serious photo journaling people, I cannot recommend PoGo.
After secretly injecting my personal interest of photography in our merchandising for the past 4 years, I was finally granted to have such a real section in the new APM LOG-ON store. If I were to propose such section on day 1, it wouldn't be approved, it would be subjected to a series of scrutiny, inquiry, doubts and attacks, eventually became an unfinished project on corporate earth.
I'm thankful even though it takes time for them. But in the process I figured all forces mysteriously working together towards this hidden agenda, mysteriously! Through numerous small projects, vendors getting more mature, customer showing more interests, higher standard is achieved..... I'm intrigued. All these require just one single binding force of good will and aspiration. Well, it is no big achievement but for myself it is rewarding enough.
The Photography retail business on earth is amazingly boring. You want a camera you walk into a camera shop, you want something printed you go to a lab, you want gadgets you go back to a camera shop. There is no CONTENT and sharing in all of them. On the surface, if you go to this Photography section of ours, it can appear all too commercial, composed with brands like Lomography, KOLO, Canon, Fuji Film, Umbra, etc. But look, there are people behind these brands working hard to bring out the fun and aesthetics to everyday lives. What's lacking in this industry is just a place to find and share contents. I'm not saying this very section is in its ultimate form, but it is a start, a very primitive start.
If you remember the "Our Last Polaroids" event last year (community photos here, here, here, here, here, here and here), it is the best memory I got in this journey. The online and offline community worked hand in hand to pull off this 2 week exhibition and gathering. It is the nearest form of the ultimate Photography gathering space in my mind.
Well back to reality. The most appealing thing about this area is that it is not a camera shop or lab. I gathered quite a few things related to analog, film, album, frame, photography, polaroid camera and films, lighters, key chains, instax, lomo, superheadz, prisms, etc. You can say it is a collage in retail form. Again, I'm not proud of its current state yet, I'm only proud of the process. So there's still a lot to do.
BTW, FujiFilm Hong Kong gave us great support recently. They made us this little Instax town display for our new store launch. Very creative use of instax film on paper made figures! How lovely.
I was among the first to grab a Diana Instant Back from Lomo about a week ago. After trying out a few packs of Instax films with lots of failure, I finally learned something. Even under broad daylight, flash is almost necessary. Any photos taken in partly cloudy condition with flash will result in a very dark background since the shutter speed of Diana is around 1/60th sec. To get a fully lit environment behind your subject, you have to use the B mode and time yourself to 1/8th sec in addition to using a flash.
The fun of having a Diana camera with Instant film is that you get the nice look as well as instant gratifications. In addition, there are so many Diana lens accessories you can play with a lot of different effects. I'm particularly interested in the surprise effects from double exposures. One interesting method to get a nice collage is to type some light color text with black background on your computer monitor, shoot once using a Diana close up lens, then double expose the film with another scene with flash on your subject. It works great with black and white graphics on your first exposure since you are going to fill up the black space with things you shoot on the second. I haven't perfected it yet but it gave me hours of fun by burning money.
The difference between "Diana Instant" and Polaroid is that with Diana Instant, you can't frame your shot as precisely as a Polaroid, but you get to play with double exposure, different lens effects, color flash, etc. And of course I love the square image Polaroid produces along with its surreal color, smaller size photo from Diana Instant is less impactful but cute. One more contrast between Diana Instant and Polaroid, for me: fast snap shot vs. slow photography.
I heard about this great collaboration for nearly a month now, I was asking the LOMO people about it like constant bugging, and it is here finally!
[prototype photo removed]
No the image you see above is not the actual product. I was all too excited so I took my Choco-mix Diana (a prototype of our own custom Diana, originally targeted to launch in Dec 08 but the project was cancelled due to the economic tsunami) and my Fuji Instax mini and took this photo. I was imagining a lot of possibilities coz this combination of analog giants means a lot to our post-Polaroid era. You can imagine all the fun having instant results of a LOMO camera, you get the cool look of LOMO camera and the instax mini photos of Fuji (I hate the looks of Fuji instax cameras BTW).
Still don't know what I'm talking about? Check out the LOMO Diana Instant Back + web page. I don't see anything on Fujifilm's web site though. I realized just now that it won't be available in Hong Kong until May 09, so you won't see this product in our early April annual LOMO event in Festival Walk LOG-ON store. If I can get hold of a sample to try, I will post more. Ready to burn money through film!
I longed to get the Fujifilm Pivi MP-300 and finally last week in Tokyo I bought it. I wish I bought it earlier because instantly my travel journaling or photo journaling becomes much much easier.
The size of Pivi's photo is just fit for my Moleskine notebook. For Traveler's Notebook, it leaves a lot of space good for writing and sticking precious stickers/tickets/etc things you collect in travel. I love the fact that it is instant yet not wasting any of your film because you can choose which photo on your digital camera to print. My Canon support pictbridge so there was no problem at all. I can now journal with photos whenever I can have a coffee stop, instant!
Delfonics just released a series of new albums, which one of the ranges allows you to put pivi sized photos in the paper album. I'm not particularly fond of the quality because the photo pocket openings are on the edge of each page instead of near the spine, which makes it easy for photos to fall out. In addition, the album pages are bound by just one staple, so inserting 10 photos (half of the album's capacity) already makes the album bulky. However, I love the colors of the covers they offer and bought 4.
Polaroid introduced its first instant camera in 1948, after 60 years the company finally announced on 8th Feb 2008 that they will close their factories for film production. I knew this about 6 months ago from friend's friend who works there and finally reality came. Films will still be available throughout 2009. News here and here. Adesso Album, a partner of Polaroid for the past several years is "extremely optimistic that another company - one that is currently or has at one time been involved in this market - will acquire licensing rights for the Polaroid instant film and continue to make the film available to the estimated 28 million Polaroid enthusiasts around the world", reports PRWeb. Meanwhile there is an online petition to Fujifilm for such thing to happen. (Here's an interview with Adesso Album's founder Lesley Matto on CNBC in 2008)
And here's a collection of Polaroid commercials:
Polaroid Commercials Vintage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDWeB3e_0a8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jd7T7Iwnng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai5jSeRRel4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw_d5o6ocEU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2GdaG48N-I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlVjH-rkFiA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpBTZG_lfQs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ittm0chdEo
Polaroid Commercials 80s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEHVbkB28pg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5BA9rrrcrs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv6tvwbz1pE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YqejzIbRe0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c94FL9pR8iQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvKcLnRo12s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkPWTWkGC_w
Polaroid Commercials Spicy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zXy-dBWmAw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it1li1LMpeg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgtHq6Bcpo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EerO95W6pNw
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