Lomography - A Warning From The Past!

Three expired films went in to be developed, just one of which delivered good results, which on the face of it sounds like very poor odds. In truth one of them was at least 30 years past its develop-by date, and had been shot on one of the cheapest cameras I’ve ever used, the infamous Lomography ActionSampler (right).

I’m not going to admit to buying this 'camera', I’m pretty certain it was a gift. One of those gifts that don’t in fact keep giving because I only used it the one time, shooting off the gaudy film that came with the camera at a bouncy castle party and a sunny beach holiday at Ingoldmells. The camera was consigned to the dusty recesses of the Bits'n'Bobs Box, but I never fully forgot about the film, albeit I'd entirely forgotten what was on it. In fact this roll of film has been haunting me for decades, so what harm getting it developed now...

The scan shown here (left) is a good example of what I got back, and here I have to stick-up for the camera to some degree. For what it's worth, the four fixed focus plastic lenses, and fixed everything else, have captured most of the photos reasonably well. If anything I feel the camera has out-performed its novel design and frankly ridiculous appearance, and in truth I've mostly missed the point of the 'Action' facility, there's really not a lot of action in my shots.

The film though! 30+ years of hot Summers have clearly taken their toll on what was already a cheap 'Lomography' roll, hence we get every colour of the spectrum, so long as it's purply, foggy blue. Thankfully we live in a time of unprecedented access to powerful image editing software, which means half-decent 'artistic' images (below) can be cobbled together with ease, even when the negatives are as terrible as these. Stay tuned for another knackered film roll, this time put through the coated glass lens of the FED...