Get Funky with your Photos

Every once in awhile I stumble across something here at OpticsPlanet that I inexplicably missed before and realize just how cool it is. Lomography cameras are one of those things. With all this high-tech, digital sophistication buzzing around our heads all the time, it’s easy to forget what photography looked like before the digital era. Some photographs looked pretty miserable, true; but others looked pretty darn amazing because film cameras imparted spontaneity into our pictures, unplanned and uncontrolled happenings that often resulted in pictures with more personality, and of course there was no option to just delete delete delete all photos that didn’t turn out.

I could easily spend a few hours browsing through the galleries at the Lomography website. Lomography offers quirky, affordable, retro film cameras with a lot of character that produce fantastic photos that no digital camera can touch. OpticsPlanet offers several of the funkiest of the bunch at very nice prices so a photographer has plenty of money left over for film. I’m surely way behind the trend that all the cool kids have known about for ages (these cameras are very popular with the free-spirited, non-conformist, world-traveling types), so you’ll have to excuse my being a Johnny-come-lately. I confess the Lomography Color Flash Holga Camera Starter Kit for 120 medium format film has been calling my name since I discovered her a couple weeks ago. With a plastic 60/8 optical lense, the Holga produces photos in which colors radiate, total image sharpness is happily MIA, and dreamy vignetting is common, especially on sunny days. Created by Kodak in 1898, the 120 medium-format film that the Lomography Holga calls for has been used by professional photographers for decades, and at four times the size of 35mm film, it results in exceptionally deep and rich colors. With colored filters and an uncoupled advance and shutter, the Lomo Holga is user-friendly and easily manipulated, so you can spend hours expirimenting with different quirks and tricks and yield consistently surprising, unique, funky and beautiful photos.