My Fuji Natura Classica

Ah my trusty compact camera. What a beaut. We’ve been through a lot, seen a lot of the things and travelled across the globe. It never fails to capture something beautiful, it never breaks or refuses to work however many times I drop it. Four years lying around the bottom of my bag, it’s gained a sorry battered state, a lived in camera! What I love about using it is how simple it is, fully automatic, just hold the focus and take the photo. Auto rewind and off to the lab.

The colours I can get from film are just STUNNING! I am partial to tinker around in Photoshop with my latest batch of scanning, but I rarely do anything significantly. The little lens is so sharp it gets everything. The little lens zoom is fine, I prefer to stick to 28mm, does me fine. It can read up to 3200iso film – seriously fast, which is what it was originally designed for, to be great in low light conditions and it works. The faster the film the grainer it gets, so 3200iso is super super grainy film, which is fun to play with. Daido Moriyama is the King of fast film and that is the true true.

The full title - Fuji Natura Classica is more known in Japan where film love is still strong, even so they aren’t too hard to get your hands on. I believe you can get them on Lomography. I got mine shipped from Japan through eBay. There is a pimped up version, called 'Natura S' with a lovely f1.9 but these are actually so hard to get. Pipe dreams, son.

It is (nearly) always stuffed into my bag, just in case I see something that catches my eye. As any photographer will tell you, there is nothing worse than being annoyed at yourself as you left your camera on the hall table and you come across something remarkable. That’s how I tend to work, what I see on the way, documenting my life in London and the latest adventure.

Notably, I took the camera on my trips in Asia in 2011 and again in 2013. You can see more of the photos on my previous blog posts. Here, here and here. Things in Asia happen quickly and you have to be quick to get the frame, thus I tended to use this over the digital. The bright colours in the city to the softer hues in parks with spring cherry blossom and evening light were captured beautifully. 

The majority of the images on my personal website are by this camera, this is sadly changing as film, processing, scanning is going up in the price it is becoming a luxury. Very sad, my fuji x100 is becoming more dominant in what I want to pick up first., even though it is a ace camera, it never is quite the same.

Shanghai - People's Park, 2013