Lomography

 

i've been into film photography since before there was an option to be into anything film photography - ie when i was 14 in the year 2000. digital wasn't an option, at least not at a price point i could afford, and mobile phones in general were the playthings of businesspeople and the super rich.

i had made friends for the first time, and i wanted to document everything. take pictures of my friends, take pictures of my school, then my college, then the world around me. so i found a cheap point and shoot in the pages of the argos catalogue and back then, film was plentiful and cheap(ish). 

then, in 2003, there was an exhibition at the urbis gallery in manchester on this thing called lomography. i'd never heard of it before. here was a photographic movement built not on technical perfection but on sheer vibes alone. the movement has 10 golden rules, with the final one being "don't worry about any rules." seeing all the lomographs in the gallery was truly inspiring - these wonderful, colourful, vibrant, occasionally over/under exposed and out of focus shots moved me. and sadly for my bank account, the gallery sold lomography branded cameras too. i walked out with a lomography colorsplash - a white plastic camera that looked like a spaceship.

this camera had a revolving coloured flash - turn the dial and your flash will be green or blue or red or pink - any of the 16 gels that came in the box. and this camera has a bulb mode - you could just press the shutter, or you could turn a dial, press the shutter, and hold it down for as long as you like, exposing the image the entire time. this was great for light painting or abstract stuff. 

i was very suddenly, and very passionately into all things lomography. shooting from the hip, snapping anything and everything that took my fancy, and like i said, film back then was cheap as chips. i'd pick up these self-posting envelopes, pop in my film and a cheque, and get back my prints and a new film a week later. halcyon days.

life happened. i got out of the habit. i started dabbling in art and writing again while at university, starting and running a webcomic for many years (which sadly no longer exists in any form).

then. then came life is strange.

this game changed my life. a narrative game featuring max caulfield, a young woman who returns to her hometown to study photography under legendary teacher mark jefferson. it's a coming of age story, about homecoming, reconnecting with lost friends, with heady themes of mental illness, substance abuse, suicide, and a sadistic villain terrorising a small american town. i loved it instantly. i found myself relating to deuteragonist chloe price so much i've had blue hair for the past 10 years.

the beauty of the game though was its clear love and respect for photography, from the subject matter, to max's pathological need to take photos on her shitty instant camera, to the use of light leaks during the loading screens, to the actual lectures on photography in the game, it was clearly made by people who love photography. and that resonated with me.

it wasn't until the awful sequel, life is strange: double exposure came out that my desire to shoot images came back with a vengeance. for as bad as that poor excuse for a game was, it introduced me to... well, double exposures. this is a photographic technique of taking a photo, and then taking another photo on the same frame. it doesn't have to be double either, it can be triple, quadruple, whatever your camera's capable of.

these days, only the high end digital cameras allow such things. that is... until you look back at lomography.

this is the lomo'instant. specifically, this is my lomo'instant.

i found this on ebay shortly after finishing the first chapter of lis: de. i've never had an instant camera before, i thought they were all polaroids. not so! this one takes instax mini film, and as well as being able to make long exposures, it can also make multiple exposures. as you can imagine, something inside me lit up. i went a bit nuts.

the only editing i've done on the above shots is removing the white border. all those trippy little effects are done by the camera as i take the shot. how cool is that? and yeah, they're not technically brilliant, but they have a charm that i can't not appreciate.

cut to 7 months later and i now own all those cameras in the first picture, right up at the top. in future posts, i'll go through them all probably. for now, i'm signing off. 

more photos to come, but in the meantime, i upload every single film photo i take to my lomo home. check it out if you like!