Malibu Stacy has a monochromatic hat
I have spoken, frequently, of the stupid ding dang camera, the thing that instantly becomes part of your personal brand once you buy it. On the one hand, there is no need for another camera. Cameras are solved now to me, personally. I bought this camera the same way most people buy a car or refrigerator: you get it, use it, turn your brain off, don’t think about it until you have to. In the meantime, you sometimes take a step back, look at the object, see all of the lived-in dings & scuffs it’s suffered, and admire where you’ve been with it. I went through a lot of personal transformation in 2020–1 and feel like I’m living a second life in many ways, and the arrival of this object on April 09, 2021 is a non-negligible part of that.
There are others, of course. Progress mandates it. They made a new version of the same thing you’ve got, and I flatly don’t care about it. I don’t care that the sensor has more pixels. I don’t care that there’s a charge port. I definitely don’t care about the flip screen, which is something that actively hurts its design and which nobody in their right mind really asked for.
What’s more interesting is the alternate models. There is a version of my camera that removed all of the color pixels from the sensor and hence only takes photos in black & white. In practice, this means you can shoot at a massively higher ISO with relatively no increase in grain, and much higher tonal definition. I don’t shoot in monochrome, I’ve never converted a single photo of mine to monochrome, and yet I remain strangely curious about this. It takes the idea of constraint that’s inherent in my existing camera – prime lens, frame as you go, crop as needed – and adds something new to it, something worth thinking & talking about.
The new model has a sibling now, too: a 43mm f/2 with everything else the same in a lighter-gray case. These are both things I never asked for, since I love to shoot both wide & low-light, but I get why they made this. And really, its existence at all is interesting, since theoretically you can just slap a different lens on the same body and charge 7 stacks for it, and some people will collect that. Not me, but people.
The merciful thing is that both of these are so price-prohibitive that I would never in my right mind buy either of them, and the mere act of collecting different versions of my camera would fully relitigate my relationship to the original thing in a way that goes against my whole values & reasoning around why I carry the thing in the first place.
I get the existence of the 43mm model, but the black & white one seems to speak to a we did this because we could sort of mindset, and so who is it for? How does the object change you as you start to work with it? It’s the sort of thing that you’re unlikely to find in the wild. You’re also unlikely to know anyone who owns one. So you end up going on this solo journey around the thing, and then you write some text about it.