A $35 Film Camera Went to Maui. Here's What Came Back.

Shooting a rocket launch at 1:30 a.m. from Morro Bay, photographing a trip to Maui with a $35 underwater film camera, and spending a week with a Lotus Emira press car on a dry lake bed: Willem Verbeeck packed a lot into the last couple of months, and this video covers all three projects. Each one involved a genuinely different approach to photography, and seeing how the results turned out across such different conditions is worth your time.

Coming to you from Willem Verbeeck, this wide-ranging video opens with the rocket launch project Verbeeck has been working on at Morro Bay. The goal has been to capture a launch with the iconic Morro Rock actually in the frame, something that eluded him the first time around. He's gone back multiple times, timing trips around launch windows. Two of those attempts are documented here, and the results are strikingly different from each other because of one variable: the moon. The no-moon shot gives you an image dominated by a fierce orange glow with the rock barely visible in the shadows. The full-moon shot is the opposite: long exposure, bright natural light, the entire scene visible as if it were almost daytime, with the rocket arc descending back toward the rock.

The Maui segment centers on a Minolta Weathermatic camera Verbeeck picked up on eBay for $35. He loaded it with a mix of Kodak Portra 400 and Cinestill 800T, reasoning that the tungsten balance might produce an interesting look underwater and the higher ISO would help in low light. The camera isn't sharp by any conventional standard, and sunscreen on the lens didn't help either. But he also shot a comparative frame on his Leica, and the side-by-side is telling. The Minolta's softness ends up reading as character rather than failure, and the freedom of shooting with something completely disposable changed the way he approached the whole trip.

The Lotus Emira segment is where the video shifts into a different kind of creative challenge. Verbeeck had the car for a full week and drove it to El Mirage Lake Bed in the California desert to photograph it covered in dust rather than showroom-clean. He was deliberately going for the opposite of a commercial car shoot: no detail crew, no polish, just a car that looked like it had been driven hard. He also brought along a modified Polaroid SX-70 that had been updated with a new motherboard and components, sent off to a modifier in Australia. The SX-70 results from that shoot are some of the more surprising images in the video, and Verbeeck makes a strong case for what instant film can do in the right conditions.

Check out the video above for the full rundown from Verbeeck, including the complete photo reveals from all three projects.