|
You see the two dinky objects in the photograph above? You know what they are? They’re my latest obsession, that’s what. Those two charmers are Lomography cameras, and I’ve just gotten a hold of them so that I can jump back into the world of analogue photography – that’s ‘film’, for those who remember the word.
The reason they look like plastic toys is because that’s precisely what they are – fun little toys made almost entirely of plastic. They’re cheap (well, if you can call paying roughly Rs 2,500 for a small piece of plastic ‘cheap’), they’re entirely mechanical (no batteries), they take 35mm film of any sort (if you can find it) and you have to be a little crazy to use them in an age where Kodak has just declared bankruptcy – which I am.
A short history lesson first. The term LOMO stands for Leningrad Optical Mechanical Amalgamation, a Russian company that makes precision optical instruments, medical equipment and the like. They make a camera called the Lomo Kompakt Automat (Lomo LC-A), a very basic and hardy stills camera in which all functions are manual and focussing is done by selecting one of four distance zones (0.8m, 1.5m, 3m and infinity).
Beginning in 1982, the LC-A was initially available largely in the Soviet Union and parts of eastern and central Europe, and when a bunch of Austrian students came across one in Prague in 1991, they fell in love with it and began the Lomographic Society International, in Vienna. Over the years, the society has come up with extremely innovative products, such as compact cameras with fisheye lenses, panoramic cameras that stretch an image across four or five frames of film, including the sprocket areas, and a spinning camera that takes a 360-degree photograph!
What’s so special about a Lomography camera, anyway? Well, to begin with, it’s the antithesis of digital photography – indeed, it’s not even the same as standard film-based photography, where you have control over the lens and its focussing mechanism. With a Lomo camera, you set the focussing zone, based on your distance from the object, and you shoot – there’s no guarantee that your subject will be in sharp focus, unless it’s a wide-angle lens.
Why would that be an ‘advantage’, you ask? At first, it sounds downright stupid, admittedly, but the thrill is in the very unpredictability of it! Lomo cameras, because they’re fairly cheaply built, also produce very interesting images right out of the box, since there’s often light leaks, too much contrast and, as I mentioned, the chance that your subject won’t be in focus. In a sense, the images are Photoshopped from the very start! You’ll see flaring, vignetting, strange colour renditions and overall, the images tend to have a soft, dreamlike quality about them. I know, it all sounds completely mad, but there you have it!
The cameras you see above are the Diana Mini and the Action Sampler, respectively. The Diana was a novelty plastic camera produced in Hong Kong back in the 1960s, and the ‘modern’ one is a reintroduction based on the same lines. It has a wide-angle lens, the aforementioned focus zones, two aperture settings, two shutter speeds and the ability to shoot either 36 full frames or 72 half-frames – that’s it. You can also mount a very cool, retro-looking flash on it, or use your own flash with an adapter.
The Action Sampler is a seriously cool concept – its lens is divided into four elements, and when you press the shutter, the elements open in a staggered way, allowing you to record four different parts of, say, the movement of someone jumping on a trampoline. Each frame of film is split into four sections, and the creative possibilities are almost endless.
I’ve put a few rolls of film through both cameras, and I’m very excited about what will actually show up on them once I have them processed! Do have a look at www.lomography.com – it’s a fascinating website and gives you an idea of what can be done with old-school photography.
|
