Happy New Year / Introducing my Lomokino

Happy new year! How are you feeling about 2012 so far? I've got lots of plans and I'm excited about starting some new projects to share with you. First of all I've decided I'd like to read some different books this year so I've added a page where I can record what I've been reading. I'm also going to try out a book club and hopefully meet some new people along the way.

I'd like to continue experimenting with photography this year and I've made a start on that with my newest camera.

Santa brought me a Lomokino for Christmas and I've made my first attempts with it. The Lomokino is a new 35mm film camera from Lomography which works like a movie camera. You turn the handle and it keeps taking pictures which you can eventually join together to make a little film.

One of my favourite still pictures from this first roll was a picture of the gallery where I got married.

Well, sort of! You can just about see the roof and part of the terrace. But I love how the sky came out.

It's in four pieces like that because they are the 'frames' of the video. It can fit about four frames in each normal photo, so you can use it like the Super Sampler.

I've had a go at a video too. To join the frames together into a film you need each of these panels as an individual picture. I usually get the photo people to do my scanning so I just had to spend a bit of time cutting each photo into four. Then I used a really basic piece of movie making software to join them up.

So this is the train I catch every morning and my nod to the history of film-making. It's very VERY short and pretty jerky, but I had fun making it!

Arrival of a train at Chesterfield from Other Amusements on Vimeo.

I heart lomography video

We had a video competition at my work and I won a prize! We had a mini awards ceremony and everything. It was only an internal event but we had several different categories and I won the gold award for the 'Now you Know' section. The idea was to either teach people something or share something you are interested in. So I made this little film about Lomography. What do you think?

i heart lomography from Other Amusements on Vimeo

Photography experiments

I got some of my pictures back this week from my film cameras, with some interesting results.
Recently I've been using my Fisheye camera and my cute little Diana Mini. I picked also up a really cheap flash to use with my lomo cameras, so I've been able to take some pictures indoors too.

Fisheye
First off these, these are from the Fisheye. It can take a picture covering almost 180degrees. I thought it might come out as a circle but I think this lens might have been made for 120 film, so as there's less room on 35mm part of it is cut off. I love how it bends things to fit them in.

Red filter
For this one I made a DIY filter with red acetate from the stationery shop. It's not a very subtle effect! But I think it looks cool here, like a 70's sci fi film.

Light painting
Another thing I wanted to try was light painting. For this you set the camera to 'bulb' then hold the shutter open for as long as you like. I moved the camera around randomly and this is what happened!

Redscale
This effect was a bit more hassle. It's called 'redscale' and is achieved by shooting through the back of the film. In a very dark room under a dark cloth I cut off a large chunk of film and taped it back on the wrong way round.

You could do some of this stuff in photoshop, but it's great fun not knowing what is going to turn up on your film.

You can see more of these experiments on my Flickr at: flickr.com/photos/ra_life/

New toys - Diana Mini and Panda-cam

Remember a little while ago I showed you my Smena Symbol camera and starting talking about Lomography? Well since then I've picked up a couple more cameras.


The top one is the Diana Mini - which takes normal 35mm film but you can take a half picture -so you get twice as many photos per film. It's pretty small, only about four inches across and very light.

The second I call the Panda Cam! It's teeny tiny. The camera is only the middle bit and is about an inch across. The bits on the sides are actually the film sticking out. It takes 110 film like the cameras I had as a kid in the eighties.

You can only take outdoor pictures with this though as it has no flash.

I've not developed any film from the Panda Cam yet, but here is one from the Diana Mini. Well technically one and a half joined together by chance.

I've signed up for a 'film swap' through the Diana Mini Love blog,
so I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with that.




If you are interested in seeing some more of these kind of pictures - check out the lo-fi sets on my Flickr :)

Adventures in Lomography

I've been getting more into photography recently so I started looking at some fun ways of taking pictures without getting into the expensive realm of digital SLRs. First I looked at Polaroid cameras - although Polaroid have stopped making instant film (I think they'll be back!) Fuji still make cameras and 'Instax' film. This is how I came across the PoGo printer. Its a tiny device that prints wallet sized stickers straight from your digital camera or phone! (its been out for a while but it has come down in price a lot recently.)

Then I began looking at film cameras. I was charmed by Lomo photographs I saw on people's blogs and on Flickr. Lomography uses cheap old Russian film cameras (or reproductions of them) to make images which are creative and experimental.

I now have a Smena Symbol (in the picture). I loaded it up with some colour film and went out to take some pictures around where I live and work. I'm really pleased with how they came out: