Welcome to The South – 1989-1992

It’s time to show my age. My first ever camera was a Konica Pop (fixed lens 35mm point and shoot film camera). I can’t draw. My brother is an accomplished artist, my mother could paint but I was hopeless at it. I had showed some interest in old Kodak camera of my grandmother’s (the Autographic type with bellows) and thankfully my parents bought me the Konica when I was about 12. 

I took it with me to university in 1989 but I was a genuine, flat broke student and the costs of film and processing meant that it had very little use. After buying an old Russian-made Zenit (the story goes that they were made with scrapped tank metal and I can attest that some of the lenses were only a small step up from milk bottles), I traded up to a Fujica with a dodgy shutter, a momentary brush with a Nikon EM, a dreadful Praktica (it scratched the film when you wound it through) and finally settled on a faithful Canon AE-1.

I took a series of pictures on the Konica Pop during 1989-91 that made it into an exhibition called “Welcome to The South”. They were mainly taken around Victoria and Pimlico but I must have ventured as far as Camden, Bloomsbury and Waterloo.

Dating from 1982 the Konica Pop is very much a classic budget point and shoot.  With a fixed focal length of 36mm, the lens focussing distance seemed to be set at about 2 metres. With a fixed shutter speed of 125th that meant your only creative control was to manipulate the ISO button which seemed to gain you a full stop of aperture – so with a 400 film I could set the speed ISO/ASA to 200 which would be F11 rather than the F16; or dropping to 100 would give F8. Each step in the ASA setting basically opens/closes the lens aperture by 1 stop. F4 was probably only achievable when using the flash. But you could also “push” the film. A 400 film rated at 100ISO on the switch (so deliberately incorrectly) could be opened up by two full stops in extreme low light to become 800 or 1600. To put it another way, if you had a 400 rated film set at 400 on the switch and you found yourself in low light, selecting 200 or 100 would open up the aperture from 16 to 11 to 8. When the flash is selected (but taped over) you can achieve f8-f5.6-f4.