My Camera Chuzhao
On my travels I decided to have a little fun with the trending “Chuzhao” toy digital camera. This camera is modeled after a Rolleiflex TLR (twin lens reflex), it has both photographic & film making capabilities. Typically, a TLR in an analog camera will have two lenses of the same focal length. One lens is for the viewfinder & the other snaps the photo. This can make you shoot from waist level instead of eye level. The Chuzhao being a toy with this feature provides a challenge worth playing with. Usually when I go anywhere on a trip I bring a Polaroid Mio, however this added weight & I wanted to travel light. The Chuzhao camera is the perfect compact size for travel. This little camera has 12MP & shoots 1080P for video. My father, who inspired my fascination with photography, says “that’s not bad”. To process the photos I utilized the free version of Lightroom on my iPad with great success in my opinion.
This camera is a classic case for “It’s not the tool but how you use it” . I find the photos have a nice warm grain to them that bring a sense of nostalgia for the early days of accessible digital cameras. My first official use of this camera was on my first full day in Japan, where I made an unplanned visit to the Tokyo Metro Museum. I took some photos while I waited for the museum to open & more once inside. This museum is a great first stop in the city, you learn a lot about how they construct their subway tunnels & how their subway system has evolved over the years to be among the most efficient on Earth. On their 9 lines of subways, an average of 6.84 million people use the Tokyo Metro every day.
For filming with the camera, there is a mechanism on the right side of it that you have to wind constantly to get it to take a video. When you stop winding, you get a 6 second window before it reverts back to a photo camera. I found it was difficult to keep it steady for walking or moving shots, but if I held it still to record movement around me I got better results. I enjoyed filming all sorts of slices of life. As for the photography with this camera all throughout my trip, I hope you will be as pleased with the results as I have been.
A Disclaimer: this is a trending toy camera on several social media apps, I did not purchase my version directly from the website but from amazon. This might be a knock off of the real thing, but this was still an interesting experiment nonetheless.