A film point-and-shoot wedding

When a daughter gets married, the duties of the bride’s father are fairly well established. Walk her down the aisle, slowly. Give a speech which looks back at her childhood, but nothing too embarrassing. Finally, pay lots of bills.

In my case, another task was added to the list. My daughter Sally asked if I could source half a dozen disposable cameras for the guests to use at the reception. As it happened, this request was made a couple of days after one of the regular email updates from Stephen at Kosmo Foto, in which he had mentioned his Cameraburo online store, where he sells a lot of inexpensive point and shoot cameras from years gone by.

With my bill paying head on, I worked out that if I ordered six of these vintage gems, and shopped around for film, the cost would be not much more than six disposables, and after it was all over I would have cameras to use at parties and festivals, or to pass on to would-be photographers.

I spent some time browsing the Cameraburo page, looking for the simplest options – true “point and click” with no focusing required, flash for the indoor shots, and nothing else to confuse the (possibly drunk) users.

After listing a lot of possibles, I settled on a complete mix of makes, including some I had never heard of before. Hanimex 35FX, Skina SK-102, Goldline Classic S, Fuji DL-15, Miranda P700, and a Sunpet with no model number, just the important “Focus free” on the front. All priced at either £10 or £20.

They duly arrived, and I spent a fun afternoon putting an old ruined film through them all, to make sure that everything looked and sounded right. I also wrote simple instructions on a label to stick to the back of each one – how to turn the flash on, how to wind on, and please try to take pictures from five feet or more. Foolproof eh? I’ll come back to that…

A few days later I spotted another Hanimex 35FX in a local charity shop for £5. Hard to resist, and it was added to the collection. Both the Fuji and the Miranda featured automatic wind-on, and I figured that anything which relied on batteries for more than the flash was more likely to go wrong on the day. So the Fuji was put to one side, and the second Hanimex added to the line-up, possibly an error – I’ll come back to that…

A 200 ASA film seemed a reasonable choice for a reception which was going to be partly outside, weather permitting, and half a dozen rolls of Kodak Gold 200, 24 exposures, were bought and loaded. To make sure that I knew which film came from which camera, I started each roll with a shot in front of a mirror.

The big day arrived, and the box of cameras was delivered to the venue to await their distribution. I didn’t want to cut across the work of the official photographer, who had said he would be taking informal shots of the reception up to and including the speeches. My speech mentioned the cameras, and the fact that the day was about making memories, and this was one way to do it – please use them! Speeches over, the cameras were handed out, and some people got stuck in straight away.

A few hours later, I went around and gathered them up. I was delighted to find that four of them had reached 24 on the counter. One, the Miranda, was on 2. As I was looking at it, somebody came up to me and said that they had used it, but the automatic wind-on hadn’t worked. I tried it, and they were right. Maybe I should have brought the Fuji along instead.

Of course, as soon as I got it home and played around with it, the Miranda behaved perfectly, as it had done when I tested it. But on the day, the film refused to budge. Such is life. The final camera, the Skina, had about eight shots left, and they were soon rattled off as people emerged the following day.

Which camera was best? It’s not easy to say

So five films were posted off to Southsun, my usual processor, with a note almost apologising for what might be the worst set of films they had seen. A week or so later, the negatives arrived back…

Maybe not the worst set of films after all, but definitely a very mixed bag, as you might expect. There were a few problems which showed up again and again – despite the instructions, there were indoor shots with no flash, and pictures taken from a foot away, sadly too close for fixed focus to cope with.

(Pics taken on the Goldline Classic S)

But in amongst it all, there were plenty of memories worth keeping. I am pleased to say that all five of the cameras which behaved on the day produced some good shots.

Which camera was best? It’s not easy to say. With very few exceptions I have no idea at all who took each photo, and what kind of state they were in at the time. All I can do is look at each set of negatives and see what the overall results were like.

(Pics taken on the Hanimex 35FX)

The negatives from the Goldline Classic S had some odd spacing – the first few frames were almost double spaced, and later on a couple were overlapping. User error? Who knows – one for further investigation. But it produced some nice images, despite being one of the £10 models. The other one from the £10 selection, the Sunpet, was actually about the best of the lot. Almost all of its shots were well exposed and focused.

Moving on to the £20 category (and I include the second Hanimex with those, even though it only cost a fiver), the Skina was good, although I know that the flash went off at random times, and not always when required – another one for testing again at some point. Both Hanimex produced some decent images, maybe not as sharp as the others, and one of them clearly spent much of the time in the hands of somebody who hadn’t read the “five feet” advice.

(Pics taken on the Skina SK-102)

So the best, based on this very unscientific test, was probably the anonymous Sunpet. That’s the one I would have no qualms about taking with me to a festival, instead of the far more valuable Olympus XA4 which sometimes accompanies me (and which I can be seen using in some of these pictures.)

(Pics taken on the Sunpet camera)

But to be honest, all of them deserve another roll of film in them at some point. Maybe in the hands of the next person who asks me why I still use film cameras.

Thanks to Stephen for supplying them in the first place, and for encouraging me to put these words and pictures together. Everybody should have a cheapo point and shoot in their bag.

Check out Cameraburo’s range of cameras to buy online here, or visit or pop-ups at Aperture Printing in London – we’re there at least two Saturdays a month.