end of the world camera?

qleak · Nov 25, 2014

I'd imagine the limiting factor for photography would be electricity. Without someone to maintain it the AC power would go down eventually (if not rapidly).

How would you print small format negative film? Sure you could make contact strips but doesn't modern enlarging equipment rely on electricity? I think this would force you into medium / large format or daguerreotype! The size and weight of these larger cameras would be problematic to your survival.

So polaroids, if you have a stockpile of working film, seem like a viable option.

Or you could be a road warrior stockpiling nimh rechargeable batteries. Not a bad survival strategy anyway. But you'd need a method to charge them (solar / crank). Or even a generator on a larger scale.

If you decided to keep a digital camera running you'd need to hoard memory cards and may as well shoot in jpeg. Probably having a battery grip with a AA option is not a bad thing.

Even cell phones seem like they'd be an okay option in airplane mode and turned off while not in use. There are hand crank cell phone chargers. Again, you'd need a cell phone with a memory card and you'd need to hoard these (shouldn't be to hard who would be using them anyway?)

So if it were me, I'd get a crank and solar charger ASAP start hoarding Nimh AA (who doesn't hoard these anyway?) and the battery grip for my D7100. Hoard SD cards. Maybe an electric picture frame to show of my skillz to other survivors ha!

limr · Nov 25, 2014

I dunno - I'm obviously biased but I still say digital cameras would be of limited use because of the difficulty in repairing them. Fixing broken electronics is a lot trickier than fixing broken mechanics. And if the film camera is beyond repair, it's more likely to find a working film body than a working digital body in now-empty houses. You'd have to pick around the bodies with the scooped out brains, of course, but by that point, this shouldn't bother you. That's the good thing about zombies - there won't be a lot of rubble and destruction, just disrepair. Nature will slowly overtake but not for years and years. In the meantime, I imagine looting will be fairly easy. There's a store across the street from B&H that has cases filled with working Leicas and other cases with some Hassies. Yeah, I'm SO looting that store!

The tricky part of shooting film will be stockpiling the film and chemicals (including homemade ones) in a place where they won't get too hot. Gonna need an underground bunker. Though to be fair, we'd probably need one of those anyway. As for enlarging, we'd either have to settle for smaller pictures or we'd have to find a way to enlarge without electricity. Me, I picture a rig set up in a darkroom (easy to manage that in the bunker!) and placed in a way to perhaps make strategic use of a directed beam of sunlight (trap door, a series of mirrors, light hits the enlarging lens...something along those lines. If I haven't teamed up with an engineer of sorts, I'll figure it out.)

For large contact prints, we could always shoot large format film in a pinhole camera. They can be nice and portable.

The same would be true of digital, actually. We'd have to accept looking at pictures only on the screen, or we'd need to make sure we can power a computer. To get a physical print? More electricity. And ink.

And all this proves that I clearly have nothing better to do this morning than to make elaborate plans for the zombie apocalypse.