I know it’s been a while, but this time I have brought you all something that actually took a lot more work to get done. So I hope you enjoy!

This Nishika N800 is a 4 lens stereo camera. the idea of it is to generate negatives to make Lenticular prints that can be viewed in 3D without the use of special glasses.

We’ll start with some history about the camera. This Nishika N8000 was first produced in 1989, it is considered to be a clone of the higher quality Nimslo camera lenticular camera. The differences between these cameras however were all for the sake of making the nishika as cheaply as possible. They opted to make the body of the camera as “professional” as possible by emulating the design traits of high end canon and nikon SLR cameras of the time and chose to make the lenses out of plastic instead of glass. This camera also has no form of automatic exposure

The camera has very basic control to the point of having only three aperture settings which are marked for “Sun”, “Overcast” and “Cloudy/Indoor” approximate values being f8, f11 and f16 respectively. These settings are all calibrated for use with 100iso film which I found quite limiting. However the above images were shot on some expired 200iso film (because that’s what I happened to have on hand at the time). With that in mind I mainly shot using flash, and on the occasions where I did shoot with natural light I compensated for the films higher sensitivity by using a smaller aperture than I would according to the cameras directions (using the “sun” setting when it was Overcast). This project was a learning curve for me as I had never made moving GIF images before I started playing around with this camera. Of course the problems with using a higher iso film is that it created a much more noticeable image noise/film grain that was amplified by the small frame size of the individual images. All in all I think I’ve found an interesting use for this camera, however the constraints imposed by such a rigid and simple exposure system (if you can even call it a system) would cause too many problems for use in outdoor lighting.

Since owning this camera I’ve tried time and again to get the best images out of it. I found the best way to make the images in the first place is to use flash, now I’ve been swapping between my Olympus t20 & t30 flash units, both of which have automatic exposure systems built in to ensure perfect lighting every time! In my newer images you can see a marked difference in the consistency of the movement wich is something ive been so happy with. Due to some tedious photoshop experiments, I finally found the right frame rate at which to play the gif files to get that wobble effect.

I’m currently in the middle of experimenting with a roll of Kentmere 100ISO film so keep your eyes peeled for another update!