Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Don't think, just shoot

Humble preface: I haven't even been able to blog or write poems lately. Perhaps it's all the traveling this summer, and visitors, and fun things to be done with friends that's taking up my mental space for the past few months. Oh, and work. (Hah!! Nice to know that it takes the back seat to funner exploits.) Better late than never, right?

When we visited New York we happened upon a store in the village that sold only lomography products. (Click pic for yelp reviews and info.)


Aside from the fact that the store was delightfully merchandised, I was tickled to find an HQ for this stuff. What is lomography, you ask? It's an analog way of taking pictures...you know, with that old stuff called, "film"...wherein you can achieve cool effects that one would associate with old cameras with light leaks, and other sorts of "flaws" that produce happy (IMO) accidents such as inadvertent color effects or double exposures. Fortunately or unfortunately the cameras have been re-introduced in the past few years at your friendly neighborhood hipster appropriators, Urban Outfitters. I remember back in school, students used old cameras, pinholes, and polaroids to achieve these kinds of effects to include in work. It's a look, and a look I happen to like. Here's some examples:


(Photo thanks to anarchy)

Cut to, there's a "Diana" camera out there that can not only achieve these effects, but can also take an instant film camera back! (Now that Polaroid instant has become defunct, I learned happily that Fuji is picking up the slack in the instant camera/film department! Oh joy!) Here's the camera that can be purchased at the lomography shop online.


Example result

In the words of Rachel Zoe, I die. I'm buyin' one! Join me! We can have a lomography geek club. I'm happy to add another artistic diversion to my life.