The Mint TL70 Vertical Learning Curve

When I was researching the Mint TL70 camera the consensus was that it is awesome, but the learning curve you have to follow is a bit steep. I reckoned that having had film cameras back in the day I’d be able to get a handle on the device by using my experience. This has turned out not to be the case.

I took the picture of the puffin this morning. It is a bit darker than I would have liked. The camera has an automatic exposure which consists of a light sensor behind a hole on the front of the camera.

Modern cameras don’t work like this. They base their exposure on the incoming image. This gives them a bit of head start when it comes to working out what the exposure needs to be.

Precisely where you point the TL70 makes a big difference to what the sensor sees. If you point the camera up it gets loads of sky, adjusts for that, and then underexposes the image. If you point the camera down it sees darker ground, adjusts for that and then overexposes the image. The trick is to find the “Goldilocks” place to point it, where you get just the right amount of light on the sensor to get a good exposure. This is made a bit more tricky by the way that the Instax film doesn’t record a very large range from lightest to darkest. In other words you’re not always able to get the brightest and darkest parts of the picture at the same time. There are two ways to fix this, you either decide what you care about, and point the camera right at that. Or you change the scene so that there is less contrast about - perhaps by replacing the sky with trees.

The picture above has perfectly exposed highlights, but the puffin is a bit dark. I’m going to have to keep practicing. It’s actually rather fun. It’s going to make me a better photographer in the long run.