Lomo Cameras

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Mike Hughes

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Just about to invest in my first lomo- genuinly cannot wait to get cracking, this looks like a hell of a lot of fun- compared to the amount of time/thought/effort/pp etc that I am putting into my digital work.

Got a few in my mind- The Diana F+; The Diana Mini; The Coloursplash and the Lomo Fisheye 2.

Does anyone have any of these currently- and would they recommend????
 
I don't know anything about the models you mention, but I do recall one called the Lomo LC-A. It was a small, rugged camera with zone focus, manual film winding and automatic exposure. It came out sometime in the mid-1980s, and we did sell many of them back in my retail days. The new models currently available are, I understand, now manufactured in China so I'm not sure how they would compare in terms of quality to earlier models.
 
Thanks for the comments guys...

Yeah, a new store has recently opened in London.
I think that this could really take off. Probably already has!!

It's quite the antithesis of what we are usually up to as photographers I suppose. Less thought, great options (affordable fisheye for instance!!), and a quirky way to shoot film I guess. Some of the effects are fantastic- the ease of multiple exposures etc....
 
I have a Lomo LC-A. Unfortunately it's a crap one. It takes absolutely perfect pictures indistinguishable from my Olympus and Canon 35mm compacts. I think I've been had over. Next time I'm going to splash out less on something like a Diana. With a plastic lens.
 
I've heard good and bad about the loma LC-A as well- which is the reason I have avoided it to be honest. Gonna go with the fisheye 2.....
 
Mike Hughes said:
I've heard good and bad about the loma LC-A as well- which is the reason I have avoided it to be honest. Gonna go with the fisheye 2.....
Click to expand...

The problem we used to get at the shop with Russian cameras was that it was pot luck whether you had a good model or a bad one. We also stocked the Zenit 12XP, and I remember they came in boxes of 10. If the first one we sold came back to us with problems, you could pretty much guarantee the other 9 would have problems too. However, if one was good, then the rest seemed OK as well. I don't know why.

The Lomo LC-A was the same - some were OK, some were not. We did sell quite a lot of them, but at £25 they were cheaper than the cheapest Japanese compacts.
 
Clack...:)

02-agfa-clack.jpg
 
.....beauty....

I have another Russian camera too- a mid seventies Zenit(h) EM. They don't build cars as well nowadays.....it's a brute. But for the fun of it I think a bit of experimentation with the lomo type will be well worth it!
 
I've got a Lomo LC-A. Initially disappointed with it, until I spoke to a Lomo promo person at an exhibition a few years ago. She recommended shooting slide film through it and processing on a C-41 process. That changed everything. Really pleased with the results, I ended up shooting a lot of film rolls and the results were very hit & miss (only to be expected if you're shooting without composing the shot), but I made a 'Lomowall' where you butt a load of shots together, scan them and mount them on a board in a panoramic fashion. That looked stunning. Individual prints benefitted from white borders also.

If you are cross processing on a C-41, make sure the lab don't colour correct because this will kill the effect of the oversaturated colours. Also I found that different film brands gave me different colour casts, shooting in broad daylight helped with contrasty shots; nighttime shots of neon lights (I took my LC-A to Vegas) turned out really well. Not every lab will cross-process a slide film, in my experience they seemed to think it would damage the equipment to do so. Only a handful of labs knew of Lomos and were happy to do what I was asking of them.

I can't vouch for the other Lomo-range cameras, (I'm not that keen, the actionsamplers etc look a bit too gimmicky and plasticky); although the LC-A isn't the best built camera in the world, the lens is great because it gives you the vignetting around the edges of shots; you could also get good cross-processing results from regular film cameras. I think the LC-A has been discontinued, so is quite expensive for what it is. It's an expensive hobby, silde film isn't cheap - and neither is processing! ;)

HTH

Si
 
I would say go for a diana mini, i LOVE mine, and it uses 35mm film, which is coolbeans, and two pictures on one print, WOO
 
Got one too, a bit too good for a full Lomo effect though IMHO.

A shot I took at the end of last year on Velvia 50:



Heavy on CA but not enough distortion/vignetting really!
 
I say go for the Diana+ and use the maximum image size - if you use the reduced size you do get more shots but far less vignetting and softness in the corners, which is kind of defeating the point.
 
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