Specifications

The Godox C100 is a camera, and also a video camera and a light meter. I didn’t use the light meter or the video camera and I bought it specifically for one purpose, which was to record memories, just memories.

It is one of several similar ‘toy’ cameras on the market. They are called toy cameras because the quality is very low by the standards of what digital cameras can deliver today.

But that doesn’t mean it has no place in your pocket.

I took it on our trip to Copenhagen. along with my Ricoh GRIII.

This is what the camera looks like. It measures about 100mm x 70mm. So I can easily cover it with the flat of my hand.

As you can see it is very thin, and at 64g you can definitely slip it into a pocket and not notice it is there. The button in the middle takes the shot. The left and right arrows change the aspect ratios.

You charge it with a USB C cable, so you can charge it with the same cable you use to charge your phone, and no need for a separate charger. And the charge seems to last forever.

You aim with the window and files are saved to a removable micro SD card. As you can see, the C100 has no actual display. You ‘aim’ by lining up the window as best you think.

I used it with the camera about a bent arm’s distance from my eye and seemed to get the framing right most of the time.

Most digital cameras images are 3:2, with some even more towards a square at 4:3, whereas the images from the C100 are 16:9 letterbox shape like widescreen TVs.

But you can change the aspect ratio. Standard 16:9 widescreen matches the sensor’s base 1920×1080 resolution. So that gets you the best quality shot because it uses all of the sensor. But if you prefer you can shoot at 4:3, or 3:2, or 1:1 square format.

When you click the left and right arrows, the frame lines in the viewer change to show the adjusted frame lines.

I left my aspect ratio on 16:9 to get the best quality photos. And I ignored the frame lines when I was shooting and just used the whole of the viewing window as my guide.

You cannot play back and see the photo you have taken. There is no playback. You only get to see the photos once you upload the files to a computer.

Why Bother?

Why bother with a crappy little camera when you have your phone? And if like me you like taking photographs then you probably have a camera with you, so yes, why bother?

Why bother with a camera that you can’t really use on a bright sunlit day because everything will be a blown out white.

Why bother with a camera that you can’t actually tell for sure where it is pointing?

I can only answer for me, but when I am in a place unknown to me, there is fun and interest in snapping things that aren’t going to be great photos but just grab my interest in the moment and I want to fix them in my memory.

Take this next shot of a street in Copenhagen, with climbing roses growing against the wall.

I just wanted a memory of something I observed, that lots of buildings, with walls that front onto the pavement have climbing roses growing against them. You can see them even in the middle of the city.

So for me it is a camera for memories, without any expectations. And because the file sizes are so small, you can put thousands of shots onto a card. I shot nearly 250 photos and they only take up 140MB.

Because of the way JPEGs are saved, the file sizes depend on the complexity of the image, but the photos I took in Copenhagen range from 350KB to 900KB with most of them at around 400KB.

I put a 32GB card into the C100. which means that about 60,000 shots will fit on that card.

In other words, you really don’t have to think when snapping. Just be aware of weather conditions and avoid bright, contrasty days. And don’t expect much in very low light like night shots or dimly lit interiors.

All around central London, in the ‘better’ parts of the city, many properties that front onto the street have flowers in window boxes or boxes on the railings that bound the property.

They lift the spirits and who knows how far the good vibrations carry?

Add to this that Westminster Council (and maybe other Councils) hangs baskets of flowers at intervals along the main roads, and the Council tend and waters the flower baskets regularly so that the blooms stay for a long season.

I was out buying stuff today and Tamara told me Notting Hill Carnival was on, so I went. Or rather I walked with thousands of others from Paddington. I didn’t get to see the parade, but I saw a lot of people.

On the way there a notice by a police van said that facial recognition software was being used. On the way back I looked in the van and a man was scanning images, and outside a man in handcuffs was shouting out to his friends – ‘I don’t know why’ and ‘It wasn’t my fault’. I wonder how good the software is?

There were a lot of police along the road – several hundred at a guess, and I was thinking what a time consuming waste it is for the most part. I guess, I should say maybe. I should say that maybe without the big police presence all hell would break loose. is that really what Notting Hill Carnival is like – barely suppressed violence? Everybody knows the Carnival is a touchy subject with a big history.

Afterwards, I thought about it and I knew I was caught a bit on the hop and unprepared for the Carnival, so I did a bit of research and here is what I found out – the history at how it influenced how I felt when I was in the crowd walking.

Where to start?

Start with Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915. As an eight-year-old she moved with her parents to New York. She grew up in Harlem and became a Marxist and a significant Communist Party figure and did so out of the racial prejudice she saw.

In 1955, during the anti-communist repression of the early Cold War she was imprisoned for nine months and then deported under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 for her political activities.

Her offence was to ‘advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence, to organise a group advocating such overthrow, or knowingly to belong to such a group.’

She was deported from the US to Britain because Trinidad was then a British colony. Without that fact she would have been deported to a Communist Bloc country as others were.

Now living in London, in 1958 she founded the West Indian Gazette, that reported on discrimination in employment and housing, reported on racist attacks and on international anti-colonial politics.

Then, in what became know as the Notting Hill race riots, white gangs attacked mostly people from the Caribbean over several days beginning on Bank Holiday August 1958.

Jones wanted a public response to assert the community’s identity and celebrate Caribbean culture, to bring people together and to send out a message saying we are here.

The first festival was held indoors in January 1959.

It was held indoors, but the idea couldn’t be contained and the next major organiser was Rhaune Laslett.

She was local, born in London, and a social worker and activist The National Portrait Gallery describes her as the “principal organiser of the Notting Hill Festival, that evolved into the Notting Hill Carnival.”

Claudia Jones meanwhile, died of a heart attack in London on Christmas Eve 1964, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx.

In the 1970s relations between the police and young black Londoners were extremely bad. It was the time of the ‘sus law’ that allowed the police to stop and search anyone they thought might be guilty of an offence, and it was almost entirely young black people who were stopped and searched.

Being on a public street and stopped while all around passers-by were looking and judging, was a major factor in the relations with the police.

The ‘sus law’ was was part of section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 that allowed prosecution of a ‘suspected person or reputed thief’ found loitering in certain places with intent to commit an arrestable offence.

After the Brixton riots in 1981, for which the ‘sus law’ was found to be a major contributory factor, the offence was abolished by section 8 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981.

But in 1976 the law was still in effect and at the 1976 Carnival there was a major confrontation with the police.

That was then, and since then the Carnival has grown to the size it is today, and over the years there have been hundreds of arrests, dozens of stabbings and some fatalities.

Now the numbers are coming through for this year’s Carnival and I was wrong by a big margin for the numbers of police. In fact, 7,000 police were deployed.

So what should I say about how I felt walking along? Pretty much OK. I was one of the oldest faces on the street, and it’s not my home patch. But did I feel ‘simmering violence’? No. it was just people.

This is the prow of the ship from the previous post