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These photos are from this generic toy camera, produced under a variety of different brand names. Mine, strangely, is branded Eddie Bauer, but I've seen them without that branding as well, and I suspect they were fairly common.
Its principle of operation is that it takes 4 pictures in rapid succession by using a spinning disc as a shutter. There is no focusing nor any exposure controls. The viewfinder consists of two fold-up plastic rectangles. Nevertheless, I've had a lot of fun using it and have compiled the tiny subdivided negatives into little animated slideshows.
The process for making these animations was very tedious, but could potentially be done quicker with better tools. I cropped each 4-image shot into its respective frames, then put them all on different layers in photoshop, where I then adjusted the position of the layers to compensate for the lenses all being slightly offset, allowing the motion to be perceptible. Then I saved each frame individually before combining them into a video. The .gifs you see on this page are reasonably low resolution, lower than the resolution of the scans I took, but they still contain most of the detail of the originals, because the quality of the camera's lens is so low, and the negatives are so small. I've also included a few frames from the camera that show what they looked like in full-quality still form.
My first movie, if you could call it that, depicts a hike through (and to) a location called Wright Street Falls in Marquette, as well as another up Sugarloaf mountain. I'm especially fond of the shot of the barking puppy.
Once, I wasted a roll of Portra 400 on this camera. The result is charming, if low quality. The memories make it all worthwhile. This film depicts a hike up Hogsback Mountain, as well as another hike up Sugarloaf.
