One Square A Day: Two Weeks of Life Captured on the Fujifilm Instax Square SQ20

The manual of any gadget or product I own is not the first thing I look at. All people really need to know anyway is how to switch something on and off, and use other basic functions.

Well, I was wrong. Had I known that when I toggled to the middle of the power button, I would have been able to capture the moving subjects of a day-long family affair (my son and nieces) better.

With the SQ20, you can shoot video up to 30 seconds long and frame grab the best moment to print out.

By day four, I’ve gotten pretty used to using the built-in filters and editing my photos, only to enhance color.

While I started out using the Martini filter and then manually increasing brightness and contrast, the photos sometimes still came out dark. I found it best to use Skin Brightening followed by additional editing for the instant prints to come out how I like them.

Our household is comprised of three humans and two animals, one dog and one cat. I couldn’t take Kiki the dog out for a walk one night so I took her on a balcony walk instead. Everyone knows it’s no easy task to make a dog sit and stay while you take pictures, so the SQ20’s frame grab came in handy. I snapped away as Kiki chased her own tail.

In low light: The resolution is low to begin with so you can’t expect image quality to be great. Quality is also noticeably compromised in high contrast situations and in low light.

A chill and quiet holiday at home for me means a proper breakfast, squeezing in a few chores and just spending time with the family. And that’s exactly what I took pictures of.

The Instax Square SQ20 features a range of fun shooting modes, like Bulb, Double Exposure, Split and Timeshift Collage.

Split, one of my two preferred shooting modes, allows one to take multiple pictures on a single image (see: plants). Choose from four segmentation options: vertically halved, horizontally divided in three or nine and in quarters. Meanwhile, Timeshift Collage lets you take four images with a time difference at once. Note: not advisable for slow moving subjects, like my cat.

Wonder’s June cover featuring Karencitta is out! A team photo became mandatory given the tech challenges we experienced prior to publishing. Here’s a full shot of (some of) us posing with our digital cover, zoomed in.

Get those full shots right: The SQ20 is the first camera in the instax series to have a digital zoom function, which allows you to zoom up to 4x to adjust your view.