A couple months ago, I found a beautiful vintage camera at a thrift store. I had no idea how to even open it, or if film was still available…and the $50 price tag was just outside of my impulse buy zone. I copied down all the info I could and went home to research, and by research I mean that I asked twitter for permission.

Dieter has seen this play out before, so of course he immediately told me to buy the damn thing and get it over with, but I wanted to make a rational decision here. Yes, I could get film, but the price was a little high, especially for something that may or may not even work. But once dear friend and smart gadget nerd Greg told me to go for it, I apparently bolted out the door immediately to go snag it.

Once it was mine and the acquisition adrenaline wore off, then I started really appraising my new toy. My Land camera turned out to have a few flaws, but thankfully nothing that seems to impact operation. If you find yourself in the same adrenaline-fueled situation, here’s a handy list of what you should check:

Inspect the bellows
Turn the camera upside down and flip the little switchy thing on the right side to open the back. Inside, the first thing you should notice is the nice, neat folds for the bellows. If there’s a metal cartridge thing in the way, remove it but don’t throw it away. If the bellows are rumpled in any way, most experts recommend passing on the camera since they’re a real pain in the humps to fix. However, mine are moderately crushed and will probably get worse with time, but they aren’t a problem so far.

Check for roller corrosion
Check the silver roller on the inside of the back. When pulling out prints, this roller squeezes chemicals over the paper and can get corroded.

Extend the bellows
Now look at the front of the camera and find the white arrow pointing up. From this angle it’ll be right below the red shutter button. Push this piece up to release the bellows and gently slide them out until you hear a click. This piece is also labeled with the number 1, and is your focus mechanism. Move it left and right with your index fingers to adjust the bellows and focus.

Check for light leaks
With the back open, point the bellows towards a light source and look inside for light leaks. If you see holes but the bellows are otherwise sound, then this is an easy fix.

Meet the viewfinder
Now finally, look through the viewfinder! It’ll be dimmer than a modern camera, but that’s ok. There are actually two viewfinders, the big square one for framing and a small circle for focus. Look through the circle and move the focus levers back and forth to align your subject.

Test the battery
Land cameras have an “electronic eye” to calculate automatic exposure, so that means there’s a battery in there somewhere! Pull up on the left side of the back of the camera and you’ll probably find a big corroded mess. This is easy to clean as long as the connector and wires are still sound. Land cameras take funky batteries, but you can get the No. 531 used in the 100 from Amazon, or you can modify it to use AA batteries.

Fire the shutter
This step will probably fail on thrift store cameras, but it’s worth a shot. To test the shutter, push down the white #3 lever to cock it, look through the circle viewfinder and move the #1 levers to focus, then look through the square viewfinder and press the red #2 button to fire the shutter. No, these instructions don’t follow the clearly numbered sequence, but trust me, it’s a better habit to get into. Anyway, if you hear one click that means the shutter mechanics are probably ok but the battery is dead, if you hear two clicks then you lucked into finding a working battery, and if you hear no clicks, then…well, there’s probably something broken and unless you’re a genius tinker type, I don’t recommend buying the camera.

If your camera passes these tests and is $50 or less, then buy it. It’s still an unproven gadget until you pull out a successful image, but this should be good enough verification to give it a shot. If you want to skip the uncertainty and throw down for a known working camera, you can try ebay (although most are untested) or buy a fully reconditioned and/or upgraded camera from the up and coming landcameras.com.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through your first image and share what I learned while shooting my first pack. I suggest starting with Fuji FP-3000B black and white film (I buy from B&H or Amazon) since it works well in most indoor light situations, but you can also buy Fuji FP-100C color film if you know you’ll be shooting with plenty of light (for scale, FP-3000B is 3000 speed film, and FP-100C is 100 speed film). You can also get film from The Impossible Project and other sources, but save the special film for when you know what you’re doing.

Not a real Lytro, but a scale model made of solid freaking metal.

I have a one-week opportunity to pre-order a Lytro light-field camera. It’s a revolutionary way of thinking about focus, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and I haven’t decided yet if I’m willing to bet $400 on Lytro having the right answers.

They’re pitching their product as a solution for the focus problem, framing the technology to make the camera seem more accessible to the everyman. This is all wrong. Auto-focus is smarter than the everyman, and there is no focus problem. Fortunately for Lytro’s marketing team, this product has landed squarely in the sights of the hardcore photography enthusiast (and based on comments on Lytro’s blog today, looks like they weren’t prepared for that). Hardcore enthusiasts understand that the point of this technology is to create a new photographic genre, to use interactive focus to tell a story.

I’m approaching this format moreso like video. Single images tell a story, but interactive images develop as you explore them. These storylines could consist of unexpected objects in the fore/background, different expressions on people’s faces as they react to an event, a sense of moving through a scene, accentuating infinity…and I can guarantee that there will be Lytro porn.

The hardware, in this case, isn’t enough. To nurture their niche userbase, Lytro also needs to create a system that connects users to share techniques and inspiration. Enthusiasts just want a creative outlet and recognition, so this could be very compelling. When outsiders stumble across this energy, they’ll be drawn in and want to belong.

But there are considerable downsides. Lytro’s v1 product offers no control of the image. I could live with auto exposure, maybe, but it gives me pause that these images won’t be compatible with conventional photo editing tools. No brightness, no levels, no color balance, no pixel destroying Instagram filters. As much as I would love to see a revival of doing that shit with glass, Lytro would do well to release an image processing library and give 3rd party developers a place in their community, too. This has an added benefit of maintaining momentum by giving users new tools to play with after the initial novelty wears off.

And in a few years, Adobe will be able to do this with photos from your existing camera. At the Adobe Max conference last week, engineers gave a sneak peek into technology that can take a blurry image taken from any camera, apply motion sensing algorithms that detect exactly how you wiggled when you took the photo, then line those pixels back up again to create a sharp image. It’s still no small feat to compile this data into an interactive file format, but the company who extends photographers’ existing toolsets with a pure software play will ultimately win.

I’m eager to explore a new creative format NOW, but $400 could also buy an iPhone 4S or the Galaxy Nexus next month. Or half a Nikon 1. Like most other gadget purchases, I’ll probably spend several days trying to talk myself out of it, then go ahead and buy one just so I’ll stop wasting my time dwelling on it.

TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows. And if he is, he will be replaced by — well, again, no one knows. No one knows much of anything. Certainly no one at TechCrunch. This site is about to change forever and we’re in the total fucking dark.

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I still too freshly remember the anxiety of waiting for news to unfold while the house you’ve poured your heart into suddenly comes crashing down, the frustration of wanting to take matters in your own hands, to DO something, say something, reach out to the people who care and ask for their help to make your story known, to say how much you MATTER…

Unfortunately, companies rarely have approved messaging ready for this kind of situation.

Emotions are high over at TechCrunch right now, and the team clearly isn’t going for the standard radio silence PR play and waiting for the situation to play out. Because politics and bad decisions aside, for the people on the front lines, the world they know is fucking solid. I respect the hell out of them for standing up to their critics and saying that, raw emotions and all. Especially so.

My sage advice for TechCrunch? Focus. They will never break you if you stick together and keep telling your story.

Edited to add a comment from Scoble:

Several years ago Arrington and I were headed to some conference and I asked him about how he sees himself. Did he consider himself a blogger or a journalist, I asked. His answer stuck with me all this time: “I’m an entertainer.”

After finishing this post, I was sitting here in the dark of my office thinking the same thing (but without the real life story to back it up). The web responds well to showmanship. Not that anyone should be over dramatic or start shit just for attention — Internet showmanship is a realistic balance of emotional highs and lows, and few are able to take their readers on a journey quite like Michael Arrington. I leave the discussion of whether journalism is an appropriate environment for that kind of theatrics as an exercise for the reader.

I’m having trouble finding words right now, so I’ll let the post speak for itself:

“Openly admitting on her website that she is “passionate about sharing life’s little details,” Lisa Brewster proves her dedication with the microflashes of her life that spill out via Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, and her personal wiki. Now she has to convince those making apps to become passionate about webOS, as HP and Palm try to jumpstart the platform. With the tech world impatiently awaiting webOS tablets and a wave of new smart phones to compete against iOS and Android, Brewster’s goal of making developers “feel like they’re part of something awesome” will be key.”

This same page consists of an Intel fellow, a startup founder, a professor…and then me, that webOS girl on twitter. I could understand if this were a post about interesting tech women in social media, but these people are making serious change in the world. Mind = blown.

The world is watching us, guys. Everybody on.