Pearly Gates (21st Century Edition)

Not bored, but curious - what is this Lomo of which you speak?

I'm going to Google it now, of course, but I'm interested to hear what you say too.

A Lomo is a kind of Russian compact camera - first made in the 30s by the state, now made by a private company. They aren't disposable cameras, but they're not a million miles off - they tend to be cheaply made. This being Soviet Russia, (where picture takes you) the cameras were not, by conventional standards, very good. The image they produced tended to suffer from high noise and distortion, particularly at the edges. They also tended to be highly saturated, high contrast images - I'm not sure if that's the cameras, the film, or the development process, but it's certainly a characterisic that I associate with them.

Where they got clever, though, is it that they turned this slightly shoddy build into a virute. With a motto of "don't think, just shoot", they turned it into the anti-formalism camera. (Exactly when they adopted that approach, I'm not sure.) The punk rock of photography, if you will. They've enjoyed a bit of a resurgence over the last five years.

Much like punk rock, I think that the anti-formalism part of their approach (I seem to recall that the company website has a load of "Don't think" "Be fast" type commandments on it) is kind of pointless. The point isn't not to know how to do something, it's knowing when a certain primitivism works. I don't like to process photos to the point that the camera is made to lie. But I don't mind it if perhaps the camera doesn't note the whole truth...

Hmm, interesting.

The reason I ask is that I'm currently on the hunt for an aesthetic for Steelwight, and the whole unreal/hyperreal look of a lot of the stuff I've seen described as "lomo" is interesting. I'm just off to play with equivalent filters on some video...

It's not *exactly* a strict lomo look, but have you seen the film Kontroll? It's one of the best examples I can thing of how one might translate elements of the look to film, without just slapping a blanket filter over everything...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373981/

It's also a bloody good film.

Not quite true that they're cheaply made. The thing about Lomos is that the mechanisms are very solid and well-made (think AK47), but the optics are idiosyncratic (wide angle, quite large aperture) and the body leaks light a bit. That's why you get that characteristic vignetting effect, with the sharp focus in the middle. It's a serendipitous design flaw in the lens design and manufacture rather than shoddy workmanship.

The punky Lomo ethos came out of Prague around the time of the Velvet Revolution in the late 80s, I think. The original idea behind Lomo was a bit of typical Communist utopianism — build a camera that anybody could own. So there were loads of them around, and they're tough little beasts, so they were adopted by photographers who wanted to document what was going on around them. It was more a 'make art with what you have' idea than a 'fuck art, let's shoot wacky photos' thing, but the immediacy in the shots was what made them appealing. As you say, that probably has more to do with the artists' intentions than their incompetence.

It's interesting that you've spent so much time thinking and messing around to achieve an effect from a "don't think, shoot" camera!

Well, I had an idea about the effect I wanted pretty early on, but I'm not very good with photoshop, and until just recently, never found a decent and easy to use filter to reproduce it for me.

But like I said above: I tend not to agree with the "don't think, shoot" approach, for my own work at least - I'm not a documentary photographer, after all. All my very best shots are the ones (like this) where I knew what I wanted to say with the shot before I pressed the button.

Oh, no, I realise where you're coming from, and I sometimes do that myself (and sometimes I work from a "don't think, shoot" perspective, but I always expect those pictures to look crap). I was just commenting on the irony, not dismissing the technique.

Remains of the West Pier? Captured the mood admirably

Correct.

How ibg?

Hi


G'night