British camera brand Chroma Camera has released its latest design – the 35mm Click.
The Click has been in development for several years, with inventor Steve Lloyd building the camera around the Double Glass 24mm wide-angle lens from lens designer Jason Lane.
Prototype models were tested by a number of photographers – including Kosmo Foto – with Lloyd refining the design until he was happy with the finished camera.
The Click has a 24mm field of view with a matching integrated finder, and a magnetic shutter which exposes at 1/100, and a fixed aperture of f/11.
The camera is fixed focus from 1m (3.3ft) to infinity, and the camera comes with a mask for half-frame shooting.
The Click is available to order now from Chroma Camera and costs £125. Nearly half the initial batch of 50 had already been sold at the time of publishing (Sunday 7 December), according to Chroma Camera.
“I’ve been designing and building cameras that utilise existing large and medium format lenses since my first field camera in 2018, but I’ve always wanted to design and build my own complete camera that I can offer as a ready to go product,” Lloyd told Kosmo Foto.
” The first thing I needed was a lens, which is where my good friend Jason Lane of Pictoriographica came in. Jason is an optical designer by trade and has talked about creating a lens for me for a long time. After talking about the requirements for the lens for a while, Jason came up with a simple but very effective double coated glass element prescription, designed to cover a 24x24mm square frame (as per my original plan for the camera) and offering zero CA/distortion.
“When Jason sent me the first elements, I designed a lens body to mount them to my Sony A7 for testing and discovered that the falloff on the full 24×36 frame created a uniquely appealing result, so my “Double Glass” lens was born, allowing me to continue working on the Click camera along the way.
“I’ve integrated an off-the-shelf 24mm viewfinder into the top plate, giving a useful composition aid coupled with fixed focus (approximately 1m-infinity) in a package that you can carry in your pocket and snap away. Whilst the camera is natively 24x36mm ‘full frame’, it also comes with an 18x24mm ‘half frame’ insert that can be fitted before loading film, doubling the number of frames to a roll.”
The Click follows on from the CubePan Advanced 35mm panoramic camera which Chroma Camera had previously released, as well as Chroma’s range of medium format and large format camera bodies.
“The Click has been a lon- term passion project for me, alongside my medium/large format cameras, and I’m really excited to be able to finally offer it in a very limited edition of 50 cameras and am looking forward to seeing what results are shared by photographers using their own. I’m thankful to everyone that has helped beta test cameras over the last 12 months, including Stephen Dowling (Kosmo Foto), Dave Walker and Laurens Willis.”
You can see some example photos taken on the Click and provided by Chroma Camera in the gallery below (pics by Stephen Dowling, Graeme Jago, Steve Lloyd and Laurens Willis)
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
I’ve never heard of a magnetic shutter. And “double glass” lens – does that mean a lens of just two elements? Picture edges are a little distracting in my opinion – so it’s very nice to see half-frame as an option. Interesting project – good to see such experiments come to life/market.