Published April 28, 2025
I love shooting with my Harinezumi. It’s not just the particular stylized images that it produces (that’s great too), but it's also the form that it comes in. In short, it looks like a toy. It sparks a sense of wonder and curiosity from onlookers when I hold it in my palm.
In contrast, most cameras from DSLRs, to your phone, to more modern equipment like the vlogger’s Osmo Pocket, for whatever reason generate a sense of alarm in people being filmed. These devices clearly look like a camera, and that instantly alerts everyone in your near vicinity to process the thought, “Oh, they’re filming something.”
The knowledge of capturing the scene subverts and distorts the scene itself.
That subtle shift, to me, ruins much of the point of photography or videography: capturing the exact moment, the specific jazz-like form that evolves out of our natural, everyday course of events. Life is art. The effect to a scene that a bulky camera produces might be small, but it does alter it nonetheless — sending a ripple throughout the ‘art’ unfolding. And that eliminates the ‘art’.
Lately I’ve been trying to find a camera that evokes a similar child-like, playful form factor as my Harinezumi, or which provides a discrete method of capturing a scene without my surroundings being on high-alert. Now that I type that out, it sounds like I’m trying to be a weird, covert agent or something. But I really just like slice of life photos and videos.
The two criteria I’m keeping in mind are 1. It shouldn’t immediately look like a camera or vlogging device, and 2. It should be able to record at least 1080p video (I already have a stylized 'digicam' with the Harinezumi, so I want something higher resolution). This excludes quite a few contenders.
I was originally thinking there was going to be some niche, out-of-production camera I would need to hunt down, but there just so happens to be a specific category of small cameras that has grown substantially in popularity in the last ten years: action cameras. So I've been looking into these below.
Quite anticlimactic for a blog post. But there's a lot that's appealing about action cameras — durability, portability, slightly-less-camera-like form factor, and for their size the video quality gets pretty damn high, far more than I need. They even come out to be around the price of slightly more obscure, out-of-production options. I'm looking at you, Canon Ivy REC.
Anyways, I ultimately purchased the Action 5 Pro. I'll likely just treat it like a normal handheld — no selfie-stick, no tripod, nothing. And while it isn’t the most inconspicuous variant of these cameras, and is probably overkill for what I’m doing, there’s a set of conveniences that come with it that should make it useful for what I want to film. Will add additional thoughts once I use it for a while.