Four times the fun
Lomo Supersampler by The Lomographic Society
By Dave Wild
26 February 2007
I've only been taking photos with any regularity for the last four years. Before that I owned a film camera a very long time ago but it was hardly used. In more recent years I've had a few small point and shoot digital cameras and my main camera these days is a Nikon D50.
I enjoy the digital experience. I can go out all day using the Nikon, shoot RAW files and save gigabyte after gigabyte of data with careless abandon, get home, pick the best shots, maybe tidy them up a little and upload some to Flickr and JPG. It's all so quick and easy.
What then possessed me to buy a film camera - and not just any film camera, but one with four lenses where the shutters trigger one after the other in sequence? A camera that you have to pull a rip cord in the style of a talking doll in order to move the film on? A camera that you look at and just think "What on earth is that?" - if you're being polite anyway!
All of those things didn't seem to matter. I really liked the images other people had taken with this camera. Each photo consisting of 4 frames just appealed to me. Some of the photos I saw were like little stories - after the first frame, time passes and the story unfolds as you move towards the fourth and final frame. That story lasts two seconds. A lot can happen in two seconds. If events are unfolding much faster, you can tell your story in 0.2 seconds at the flick of a switch.
My first film was a slide film. Fujicrome Sensia 400. I had no idea what I was doing except I'd heard that if I took it to get developed as a normal colour film, the colours would be kind of funky - cross processed if we want to use the preferred term. So, I finished the film and after winding the little handle round for some time to put the film safely back inside it's spool, I dropped it off at a supermarket developer for a one hour service - digital impatience costing me a premium.
When I picked the film up an hour later, the lady behind the counter knew my name and seemed to be expecting me. She said that they were puzzled by the results because there seemed to be four images in each photo and the colours just looked bizarre - so they did another set for me as black and white. They didn't charge me for the extra set which was nice.
Walking out of the supermarket with my photos was like going back in time. I'd forgotten what it feels like to collect some photos, never knowing exactly what you're going to get - with this camera and the film I'd used, there were even more variables involved with this than anything I had done in the past.
I saw the photos and fell in love with them. I'll still use my other cameras, but this little blue one will be in my camera bag all of the time from now on.
Now when I'm out taking photos, what the subjects will look like over 2 seconds is a thought never far from the front of my mind.
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