Going plastic

This Friday I got an interesting package. My first plastic toy camera, the Diana F+ with a lot of accessories. Having a nice DSLR with a good mix of high quality lenses, this is something completely new for me, however I’m by far not the only one who turns towards the cheap plastic lo-fi. Let me try and analyze what I think is going on in the world of art and photography:

The disadvantage of Digital Photography

Digital photography has been around for some years now. I got access to my first digital camera – I don’t even remember the brand -  when I was the photographer for the school magazine in highschool some eight years ago. It was a two megapixel wonder that was quite bulky and didn’t take very good pictures, but they were digital, so I could just drag and drop them into the articles. This is exactly why digital got so popular. With the rise of the internet there was a strong demand for being able to share your photos and all that. I will not go into details here, it’s basically common knowledge. Anyway, we have all been witnessing a megapixel war. Cell phones came with a camera from around 2003 in Denmark, as far as I can remember. They were not very good and most of them took pictures in a VGA-like resolution of around 800×600. Since then, there has been a competition of who could cram the largest number of megapixels into these tiny CCD chips.

Digital SRL’s were introduced also and they had a smaller sensor than their 35MM parents. Their format largely resembled the APS Classic film format with a sensor size of 25.1 × 16.7 mm, and cell phones with cameras in reality just followed along the already raging megapixel war that went on between digital cameras in general. unfortunately, it was largely perceived that the more megapixels your camera had, the better it was. In my eyes this megapixel war has been fought with general image quality as the big loser. The level of contrast rendition on a modern digital camera is still sup par of any comparable film camera, hence the overrated HDR technique came in use. Often digital cameras weren’t able to capture a full daylight scene without either blowing away the sky or darkening the foreground objects too much.

HDR utilized an old trick for bad photographers called bracketing. Bracketing allows you to automatically take a number of photos with different exposure settings, mostly a combination of darker and  brighter exposure settings. Taken on a tripod of a static scene these images could be merged together exposing both foreground and background. Unfortunately this has been over used, especially with a technique knows as tone mapping where every element in a scene would be highlighted beyond recognition. Look through the HDR groups in Flickr if you need some examples of what I’m talking about, but keep bleach handy and apply to the eyes if necessary.

These limitations of the DSLRs and the digital format in general has led to many people taking up film photography instead.

LOMO and all that

LOMO is an interesting artistic movement that preaches spontaneous photography with cheap plastic cameras. It is in many ways a movement that has many similarities towards everything that has to do with being hip and fashion, but as an expression it has some very interesting facets. The Diana camera was a plastic camera from the 60’s and 70’s and produces pictures that express what we connect to that era in amateur photography. This form of expression is also present in other forms of art. Music would be a good example, where the sound of 70’s analogue synthesizers are an often sought effect.

The whole LOMO movement can also be seen as a direct counter-movement of the well-polished modern photography, where everything needs to be perfect. Modern photographers spend hours polishing their pictures in Photoshop and spending thousands of dollars on expensive optics and lighting gear.

With a lomographic camera you get a camera that has almost no settings, where everything is made of plastic, including the optics and no batteries are required, creating a whole new view of photography, where only the motive and composition needs attention.

The rules of lomography encourage people to shoot spontaneously, even from the hip. Such guidelines are not well-seen in digital photography. Countless blogs gives you detailed instructions that go over many steps in order to set up the scene for one picture. Here you shoot from the hip and hope something interesting comes out of it.

While I do not necessarily condone just shooting pictures without thinking or having ideas, the simplified camera gives you a new perspective on photography. You can use the spontaneousness of the format to shoot whenever something interesting appears instead of staging everything to create the frame for a so called perfect shot.

I’ve shot the first six rolls of 120 medium format film but have yet to see the results. I must admit that I really enjoy walking around with the plastic camera with the oversized flash. It attracts people and it’s easy to get people to pose for a picture. I’ve been drooling over the 6×6 medium format lately and I can’t wait to get my pictures developed. In time, I will be setting up my own darkroom and scanning the negatives myself. There is no point in printed pictures if you ask me. Everything needs to be online in this age.

The Diana camera gives you pictures with iconic vignetting as well as occasional light leaks and other flaws that are really a part of the charm. This is not perfect photography, but we find beauty in the imperfect.  The many modifications to the Diana camera makes it very versatile. With the kit I got a number of lenses, including fish eye, wide angles, close up and tele zoom . It uses 120 medium format film but a 35mm back was supplied in the kit as well. It was a great purchase if you ask me, and I’ll be sure to update this blog with any pictures I take as soon as they get developed.

I would like to hear your view on this article, and if you disagree with my less than thorough analysis of things here, please leave a comment and I’ll be sure to answer whatever comments you might have.