Lomo-Lovin'

I had a present waiting for her on the coffee table. We'd only known each other for about three weeks leading up to that fateful and exciting day that she consented to move in with me, which by anyone's standards would have seemed impetuous at best, but it felt right, somehow, and so we decided to just plunge right in.

Two of the three weeks leading up to our cohabitation, we weren’t even in the same country. Having left for Manila to see her family during the Christmas holidays, we went directly from second date to long-distance relationship. We spent long nights pining for each other’s company via the conduits of googletalk and skype. It was thoroughly modern and unsatisfying, but it was all we had.

During this skype-based courtship, I devoted a great deal of time to stalking her online. With a little tenacity and luck, I stumbled across her twitter account, myspace page, and few blogs in which she revealed her likes and dislikes, and in particular her uncommon affinity for cameras. Moreover, she revealed that she was by all senses of the word a complete and utter camera nerd. I was overjoyed.

But it was more than just a love of optics that struck her fancy; she was enamored by imperfections caused by old cameras (faithfully reproduced) and administered with a “shoot, don’t think” ethos. This strange new old-world photography even had a special name: Lomography.

 Here we see me holding one of the more popular lomos on the market, the Diana+. This camera is a bit deceptive, as it appears to be extremely simple (and light and, frankly, a bit flimsy), but in reality it is quite challenging to use. Fully manual, you have to do a lot of guessing to get a decent photo, or even to get a photo at all. From our first roll with the Diana+, I believe we were able to recover no more than four pictures. Now sure, some of that can be chalked up to ambitious double or triple exposures, forgetting to check the zoom length, or relying too much on the viewfinder, but I maintain that for the vast bulk of our failures were due to not adjusting correctly to the lighting conditions, which is just something you have to keep guessing at. This shot was taken with a Colorsplash, which makes lovely saturated images that are pretty much perfect the first time around.

The Colorsplash is elegant, easy to use, and a great deal of fun for just about any occasion. It looks like this:

So back to that gift. On one of her blogs she wrote a Christmas list to her Secret Santa asking for a wide range of possible gifts to suit any budget, including a lifetime supply of her favorite candy and even a brand new laptop.

Among the more attainable items that made the list, she asked for a 35mm back for her Diana+, which would allow her to use cheaper film and thereby take more photos with this highly temperamental camera. So upon her arrival, sitting nicely wrapped on the coffee table was a brand new 35mm back. She was overjoyed.

Over the past several months we have taken the lomos out with us on many different occasions, with mixed but generally amusing results.

Dream World's Angry Baby

Pretending to be Backpackers on Khao San Road

Today she returns from a four-day business trip, so I have decided to surprise her with the newest addition to our shelf of broken clocks, antique cameras and lomo-optics. Right now, wrapped neatly and resting on the coffee table, is our brand new Supersampler.

There are just so many cool things people are doing with this camera. I can’t wait to be one of them. Viva la lomo!