Disposable cameras

So far, all of these photographs are from Kodak disposable cameras, which cost less than $10 apiece. These little critters have spared me the trouble and worry of packing a decent camera through an airport. The lenses aren't very good: there's a good deal of spherical distortion and all the edges turn into rainbows near the margins of the negatives. But these photographs wouldn't exist without the disposable cameras, because I wouldn't pack a decent camera through an airport.

There are two steps to getting decent photographs out of a disposable camera (if you are willing to consider these flawed photos decent):

1. Process the film only. Do not have any prints made. The prints will disappoint you, and they are very expensive. If you skip the prints you won't mind the expense of taking the film to a decent shop where they won't gouge deep grooves in your negatives.
2. Scan the negatives and fix them up in Photoshop or equivalent.

In Photoshop, you can generally boost the saturation a good deal, and you'll want to tweak the response curve at the low end. A little color correction goes a long way. Disposable cameras have no focusing mechanism. They instead use very small apertures to to get a deep field. This means they need fast film. ISO 800 is standard for outdoor disposables, and it's very grainy in the low end, and has a nasty toe. You can lock the bottom 5% of the signal down to solid black, and it looks a whole lot better.

One other tip: if you are using Photoshop 4 or 5, use adjustment layers. Once you commit a curve to the image data you've lost significant information, typically in the extremes where it's already sparse. Use adjustment layers for any operation you can: they leave your image data unmodified so you can work with it. A simple example  (this explanation is targeted at artists, not at Ph.D.'s in digital signal theory): suppose you use a curve to increase overall contrast clipping the first 20 values to zero and running a line up to the high end where you clip the topmost 20 values to 255. Once you've performed that operation as an edit to your image data, any information that was in the 20-value margins is permanently lost from the shadows and highlights; also, image data is destroyed throughout the image by rounding errors (this is where the 8-bit discreteness of the value space rears its ugly head). If instead you create a curve adjustment layer, your image data is unmodified but displayed with the effect of the curve, which you can show or hide like any layer. You can also change the shape of the curve if you like, or even apply an image mask to limit its scope. The same principle applies to every operation that can be attained through an adjustment layer.