“Spy Gear: Spy Wrist Cam” half-frame
The ragged edge is the actual inner frame after being cut to remove the Spy Gear overlay that would have been “burned” into each picture. This is a kids 35mm half-frame camera (takes 48 shots on a 24 exposure roll) and I’m pretty surprised by the sharpness of the images.
what camera is this? this isn’t from that 1980’s line of toys, spytech, is it? remember those commericals? “cancel the plan; they have spytech.” great pic.
re: that public art tagging thing you were talking about in the last post - have you heard of this new phenomenon “cassettag”? you make a mix tape and fasten it to walls all over the city with instructions. the person who grabs it is then expected to make one in return and fasten it where they found yours. i heard about it at a lecture the graffiti artist zephyr gave a couple of years ago in t.o.
“Spy Gear” — Yeah, it’s a kids’ camera that has a wristmount that flips up (which I didn’t use). It also winds the film upside down for whatever reason.
I haven’t seen any “cassettags” around that’s for sure. I’ve seen a few discarded cassettes but usually with their light brown tape spilling out for 50 metres or so. These tapes are often either Madonna or Van Halen.
I once found an Iron Maiden tape laying in a ditch and kept it for “Number of the Beast” and “Run to the Hills”. Ya not quite the same I know.
I like what you did with these two photos… made your own choppy version of a regular 35mm frame
p.s. this camera was purchased new at Toys r Us around xmas time. Not as cheap as you’d think. I think they’re fairly recently made.
“run to the hills” - brutal riffs.
i remember when i small and was a big milli vanilli fan (shut up) and found out they were frauds, i took the tape and ran it around two elm trees in disgust at recess. it stayed there strewn for a week.
also, wondering - does this spycam thingy take 35mm? i’ve always wanted to get one of those novely pen cams from inside comic books.
Yup. 35mm.
Most of the “spy” cameras you see are 110 camera though. I’ve got a “Holga Micro-110″ which is tiny. But 110 film is too much of a hassle since you have to take it to some place like Blacks for processing and it takes 2 weeks.
honestly, how much did you guys pay for this camera? if it was under 20, i’m definitely going to get one. for a kid’s play camera the picture quality is really quite shocking.
what’s the consistency of images been like so far?
It was sort of over priced for the novelty but it is fun. It was between $20-30.
The image quality is pretty good. I think the lens might actually be glass. It has an aspherical 22mm lens which takes wider/taller pictures than it’s square viewfinder shows.
Heh - I just looked and you can get them on EBay for under $10.
milli vanilli eh?! funny story - when that whole lip sync fraud went down me and a friend (we must have been about 12 yrs old) thought it would be fun to go into the local Zellers and hide all their milli vanilli tapes so no one could buy them. we stashed them all throughout the store - behind the socks - in the sleeves of winter coats - inside shoe boxes and microwave ovens. we had a blast - but as soon as we stepped outside the store we got nabbed by the undercover fun busters! game over kids hand over the goods.
anyway - going back to what chris was talking about recently and Davin’s public art ideas and now tape posting…. a while back i was thinking about starting an urban exploration game involving some infiltration (www.infiltration.org) type adventures only interactive - with a web site as the hub. this idea still needs to be worked out - but if we combine photography with public art/graffiti and found/dropped objects and urban exploration we could have a great project/game to play with. i don’t know - is it to complicated? would anybody be interested?
11 Comments