So last week the Lomography folks unveiled their new product – a new-fangled old-fashioned movie camera using actual film!

I confess I think they’ve done something very clever. 8mm, 16mm, Super-8, all those old movie films have something in common: it’s really hard to find somewhere to buy the film, and it’s nigh-impossible to find somewhere to develop it. There’s like maybe 4 places left on Earth that process Super-8 on a regular basis.

So what the LSI gang have done, is come up with a funky retro hand-cranked movie camera, that takes common normal 35mm film, that you can still buy lots of places, and can still get developed lots of places. (Except around where I live, apparently.)

Now the drawback is that a 36-frame can of 35mm film is not a lot of film when you’re talking about motion pictures. The LomoKino camera fits 4 movie frames in a single still-picture frame, i.e. instead of 24mm by 36mm, the movie frames are 24mm by 8.5mm. So your 36-shot roll of film gives you about 144 frames. The LomoKino can crank at about 5fps so this is…less than 30 seconds of footage for a whole film cannister.

Still, it’s pretty keen. The camera looks good and if you get bulk film off eBay and process & scan it yourself, it’s not that expensive to make your own retro movies.

Here’s my first – Through the Cemetery, shot on Kodak Tri-X with the LomoKino. Enjoy!

Going in a completely different direction from my usual photographic interests, I recently picked up a totally plastic novelty toy camera – a multilens Actionsampler.

These cameras have four lenses in a two-by-two layout, which result in four 1/4-sized images on a single 35mm negative. The four mini-frames are taken sequentially (rather than simultaneously) so that the four mini-images are each a fraction-of-a-second apart. Thus, it lets you ‘sample’ some ‘action’.

Lomography Actionsampler

The camera has no focusing or exposure controls. The lenses have a 26mm focal length and the shutter speed seems to be about 1/100th. Focus is fixed, 1.2m to infinity. The aperture is unknown, but small – probably around f/11. They have some suggestions to vary the film speed based on the weather (sunny, cloudy, et cetera) but I’d ignore that and go with ISO 400 at the slowest. In fact I used ISO 800 and that was acceptable from bright daylight to dusk. Indoors it was inadequate – this is an outdoor daytime camera only.

The interval between pictures is listed as 0.22 seconds, so all four frames are taken in just under 3/4 seconds. With a 1/100 shutter speed, fast action will show some motion blur. Slow action may not show enough difference between the four frames, so there’s a trade-off to be had – either the four images will appear nearly identical, or you’re likely to see some bluring.

The camera does not take any batteries, winding and rewinding is simple and manual, and the shutter release is also a simple plastic button. There is no viewfinder as such – you frame your shots via a simple fold-up plastic frame. Or you just ‘shoot from the hip’ and hope for the best.

The camera is very light – 100 grams. It seems a little bulky and blocky, and feels like they could have made it smaller if they wanted. The size and light weight make it feel very, very cheap and toy-like. The biggest complaint I have though is actually the noise – when you trip the shutter, it makes a noise that is a bit unpleasant and quite noticable. Sort of a brief plastic grinding sound. I suspect it is a clockwork that causes the 0.22 second delay between each of the four shutters.

The Actionsampler’s four images start at the upper-left and end at the upper-right, moving anti-clockwise. With some practice one can figure out what kinds of motion / movement are most appropriate for this camera, and then I’m sure it would really shine. It does seem to love people, and although the focus is set for 1.2m to infinity, it’s mini-image format will make it happiest with people 1.2m to 5m. Not a great camera for landscapes or architectural shots, I think.

Overall, it’s not a good camera by any means. It’s a toy, and a novelty. So why’d I buy it? I was curious and I wanted to play!

Another “experimental” technique for playing around with film and photography, Redscale is where you load the film backwards in the camera. That is, instead of the emulsion facing the lens, you load it so the emulsion is towards the backplate and the back of the film is towards the lens.

Redscale, like cross-processing, is another one of those well-known techniques that I’m only just trying out now.

This technique mostly only makes sense with colour negatives. The idea is that film for colour prints includes a red mask in its base layer. If you look at processed colour negatives you will see they do have an overall red, orange, or brownish tone to them. When using the film as intended, this has no effect on your pictures as the light coming in through the lens strikes the emulsion before getting to that red mask.

When the film is loaded backwards however, the light has to pass through the mask before getting to the emulsion, giving the pictures a red or orange tone. There can be additional strange colour effects as some films employ additional colour filtering in between the layers of emulsion, and when using the film ‘backwards’ everything is in the wrong order.

The four images above all came from the same roll of film. I found that the amount of red varies with the exposure, as the longest exposure had the most non-red in it. These were all shot with my beat-up Holga, using medium-format ISO 100 colour negative “redscale” film, processed and scanned at home.

I’m going to try some more of this redscale stuff. I had been thinking to try it with a faster film, but I’ve read that faster films have darker anti-halation coatings which nullify the speed advantages. I might try it anyways just to be sure.

As I promised earlier, this will be a post about that Lomography thing. I’ve mentioned it in the past and on re-reading, I know I sound somewhat negative about it. Really I think my stance is mixed – there are things I agree with, and things I don’t.

Before I get too far into this, for folks who haven’t heard the term before, here is the Lomography About page. That is a bit of an introduction.

For the TL;DR crowd, here’s a quick summary: Lomography is about analogue (aka film) photography, it is about embracing and celebrating funky results and surprises, and having fun with your camera rather than getting hung-up on achieving technically perfect images.

Intentional Double Exposure

And in fact, that is what I like about it. When I painted, I did mostly abstract work, and tried to do some surreal work. My feeling was that it was more important to have fun with the media and explore / experiment with it in non-traditional ways, rather than worrying too much about an accurate recreation of a realistic image. Or put it this way – good reliable cameras have been around for 50 years, so why waste time trying to paint like a photograph? Use the paint and canvas to have fun and do things you can’t do with a camera.

That same argument I believe can be applied to analogue / film photography: reliable, high-quality digital cameras are now almost ubiqutous, so why waste time trying to get 100% perfect results with old analogue film and chemistry? Instead, just have fun with the film, the light, the chemistry. Experiment and be creative and see what happens.

Clearly, this is an area where Lomography and I are in agreement. There is at least as much fun and enjoyment to be had in the process of doing and creating, as there is in the having and viewing afterwards. The Lomography folks have gone a lot further in defining this than I ever did of course, and have even defined a set of ten “golden rules” to apply.

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Have you heard about this Lomography stuff? It’s sort of a ‘movement’ thingy. They use these Lomo LC-A cameras, or Holgas, or Dianas… the point is using a cheap / crummy / mediocre camera, expired film, ‘shooting from the hip’, cross-processing with the wrong chemistry, whatever – so the end result is sort of the opposite of carefully composed properly exposed photography.

Perhaps its a little like throwing cans of paint at a canvas, and calling it fine art?

It also reminds me a bit of the Dada movement from about a hundred years ago, sort of an anti-art movement, where the Dadaists were rebelling a bit about what the modern world was calling art, and they went in some wierd directions to sort of call attention to the pretentious silliness of it all. (Yeah, I actually learned stuff in the Art History classes in highschool.)

Anyhow, so the thing with Lomography is that ‘bad’ is ‘good’, or something along those lines. That you find the beauty in the results you get, and you don’t know what you get till you get the film back. They do caution that you can’t expect every shot to be a masterpiece, you might only get one good shot out of a whole roll…(**)

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