The best way to spend $150 this summer: A travel camera
Put the phone camera down, pick up a Kodak Snapic A1, and don't look back.
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TO TELL you the truth, this job has allowed me to try a lot of cameras I have no business holding. Every year, I get hands-on with the newest Leica releases. I love it, obviously, but then I talk to a professional photographer friend and realize that what I’m experiencing is the equivalent of a rich guy paying to drive a car that could only be appreciated by Max Verstappen. I realize the camera is carrying me. And as for trendy Fujifilms, my Instagram aesthetic doesn’t need that. And why the fuck would I take a high-powered mirrorless camera on vacation? I’m not a wildlife photographer.
I love all the pro and prosumer tools, but I’ve started to realize that a point-and-shoot, something that forces you to get up close, is what I find the most fun. I’d been tooling around on eBay for something vintage—an Olympus, a Pentax, or something above my pay grade like a Yashica. But when I was back home, a friend of mine—who is a professional sports photographer (follow him here), and a geek about gear—was carrying a brand-new Kodak Snapic A1. I told him my dilemma and showed him my eBay saves. He immediately said, “Well, what you really want is this,” and held up the camera he’d been shooting with all evening.
It’s the best advice I’ve ever been given.
You don’t have to baby it
As my photography shrinks, my friend’s conclusion—and, I guess, my breakthrough—came from me saying that most of my picture taking comes when I’m travelling. Whether I’m walking through town on a Saturday, on a three-day weekend road trip, or vacationing overseas, I don’t really want to worry about the camera I am holding. I want something I can toss, actually toss, in a bag. I want as few moving parts as possible, because I don’t want to get stuck on vacation with a 50-year-old camera that might give out on me just when I see a good bit of light. I don’t want to think twice when leaning over a body of water. And, like the cheap throwaway watches I wear while travelling, I want something that I won’t be devastated to lose—by my own forgetfulness or someone else’s sticky fingers. This little Kodak Snapic is perfect for all of that. It cost less than what I pay monthly to park my car, and the plastic body never shies away from a beating.
It’s everything you need, nothing you don’t
The Snapic A1 doesn’t look much different from a disposable—and let it be said, I actually find disposables pretty unbeatable when it comes to form factor vs. price—but it improves on the shape. It’s small, but the textured grip on the right-hand side of the body makes it comfortable and steady in hand. The plastic body has a nice weight to it, and the buttons are all well-placed, well-raised, well-weighted. I wouldn’t call it a masterclass in design for user experience, but it’s definitely considered.
As for the specs, the meat of the camera, there’s not a ton to talk about. You get a wide 25mm three-glass lens—which is actually really lovely for the price. The shutter speed is a fixed 1/100s, and the aperture is a fixed f/9.5. There’s a double exposure mechanism if you want to get artsy. That’s really it. It’s wide-angle, so a true beginner is going to find it really easy to take big shots of vacation landscapes. But someone more experienced—or best of all, someone in the middle of really learning how to shoot—is going to have to learn how to get close to what they’re shooting. That, I think, is the best thing here.
