Gloriously Analogue Movie Making

I seem to have difficulty visiting Photobooth SF without coming home with some kind of new photographic goodie, whether it be an awesome tintype portrait, some Polaroid film, or an analogue camera of some sort. On our last visit, we picked up the new LomoKino Super 35 Movie Maker after giving one a test drive at the shop.

This is quite an interesting camera. You start by loading any kind of 35mm film into the camera body. You can then advance the frames with a built-in hand crank that ratchets off quarter-frame exposures onto the film strip at a speed of…well, it depends how fast you turn the crank. Doing the math, a 36 exposure roll of film should net you 144 frames of Lomo goodness.

Other control points include the slider up front for adjusting aperture between f/5.6 and f/11 on the lens, as well as a close focus button that lets you focus down to about 0.6m. Up top is a flip-up viewfinder and a hotshoe.  An indicator on the side of the camera tells you approximately how much film you have remaining. That’s pretty much all there is to it!

In the image above, you can see the optional LomoKinoScope to the right of the camera. You can spool your developed film into the device, hold it up to the light, and turn the crank to watch the film in motion. Very cool.

After we unboxed the camera and figured out how to load it up, we got to shooting and ended up going through two rolls of slide film at the beach.

Here’s what the film looked like when we got it back from the lab:

We brought these strips home and viewed them in the LomoKinoScope, but wait a minute, I wanted to share this on the web! So it was back to the lab to get some scans done. Here are a few quarter frames we cropped from the scans:

This, of course, is not how LomoKino is meant to be experienced. We needed to turn these frames into a movie somehow. Special thanks to my wife Bridget, who cropped each quarter frame by hand in Lightroom before putting them together to make the following short clips:

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Interesting that my first hands-on experience with Lomography would be with their first movie camera. I think I’m beginning to see the the appeal of shooting Lomo. The results are funky and unpredictable, and the process is just plain fun. I think I’m going to take another look at that LC-A. =)