In these days of high tech, high spec digital cameras even the rankest amateur can capture technically professional-looking images – but there's a growing trend of happy-go-lucky snappers who yearn for a more simplistic approach, a return to a time when photography was perhaps less predictable. Decidedly low-tech and highly idiosyncratic plastic, or 'toy' cameras such as the original 1984 Lomo Kompakt Automat (which spawned the term 'Lomography'), the Diana and the Holga, and the recently introduced Blackbird, Fly enable them to create images that – while not technically perfect – display a quirky sense of fun, spontaneity, and creative artiness. Whereas digital cameras and high spec film cameras boast the technology to eradicate undesirable optical 'faults' such as vignetting, barrel and pinchushion distortion, converging verticals and noise, the owners of their cheaper cousins – which have only rudimentary plastic lenses – relish the manifestation of such visual aberrations in their pictures. Colours are typically richly over-saturated, exposure frequently off-kilter, focus dreamily soft. Plastic cameras lack light meters, autofocus, auto film advance, adjustable shutters and digital sensors, notoriously leak light onto the 120 or 35mm roll film they employ, and there are some wacky versions: flamboyant wide-angle fish-eyes, stereo cameras with two lenses and two flashes, pinhole cameras that don't even possess a lens, and multi-lens cameras that create negatives combining up to nine images on a single 35mm frame.
