The allure of throwing cameras

It’s definitely old news by now, but I’m still amazed by the weirdest photographic method that I’ve seen on Flickr: cameratoss. For those unfamiliar with the process, you set your camera’s shutter to a long exposure time, push the shutter release, and throw it in the air. Physics does the rest of the work, and you can come up with some surprisingly cool results. Most of the time, though, your toss yields a rather unsatisfactory, blurry blob.

The regular cameratossers are serious enough to where there’s a cameratoss Flickr group and even a cameratoss blog showcasing the better tosses as well as how to make your own. Will this be the next Lomography? Before anyone else comes up with the idea, I need to get my hands on a Holga and create holgatoss. Until then, however, I tried a rather expensive (in terms of attempts) alternative, since I’m too paranoid to throw my Leica-lensed Lumix in the air: polatoss. I launched my Polaroid OneStep Express into the air, and, needless to say, the results were far from spectactular.

Polatoss might work with a Polaroid NightCam, since you can use a cable release to take up to 8-second exposures (obviously, the Polatoss is then Polatethered, but I doubt it matters too much.)

(I also tried treotoss, which failed quite miserably as well, but hey, at least the name is cute.)