FFP 2020 – June – Beautiful light
In June, every year, I take my car to the Auto Shop for some maintenance and minor repairs. It’s a small price to pay in order to have a fully working car all the time, except when the battery dies on you in the morning that the road trip is planned…that never gets old. Since I would lose 3-4 hours of my life I might as well do something creative with this time. So, I took my Kodak Twin20 camera with the last Lomo 800 roll so that I can shoot it and get rid of it. I don’t know what happened but I just have had a lot of bad luck with this emulsion. I have shot a few photographic emulsions in my 7-8 years of film, but none behaved like Lomo 800. I managed to get some Kodachrome (yes, the one and only) rolls, shot it and developed it as black and white but even so, I got better results. Me and a few other members of this year’s edition of Frugal Film Project are glad to get rid of Lomo 800 and never shoot it again. Keep reading and you will know why.
Anyway, where was I…Oh, yeah, so near the Auto Shop there is a park. OK, so the park was 5 kilometers away from the Auto Shop but heck, I had a lot of time to spare on my hands. It was a cloudy morning, around 8 AM, and I was really hoping for some sun in order to get a bit of light so that I could compose with this month’s theme. Luckily, when I reached the park the sun was making his way out of the clouds and this was my awaited moment. I walked around searching for some good composition and got a few but not as much as I would have wanted. As mentioned before, I am a fan of deserted things: towns, parks, forests, etc. So naturally at this time in the morning there was almost nobody in the park…almost. Just a few people jogging and fishing. Yes, fishing since the park was near a lake and you can see older guys going to fish each morning.
From my perspective at that time, I thought that I got at least 6 or 7 keepers that fit the theme. Actually, from the development point of view, I got only 2 keepers. One was a clearing through the trees and at the end a view of the lake, which was awesome, but I went with the second one since it presented itself as more appealing during the post-processing. I caught a moment when the sun was throwing some sun rays through the clouds and the light fell on a tree that just made my day. If you see the photo that might not be it, because Lomo 800 has that ability to ruin your reality, but if you would have been there you could see the picture in all its glory.
So yeah, I am glad to get rid of Lomo 800. To be fair, the camera that I used is not the best I could find, but I shot color negatives with it and never had this issue like this. But after getting badly lit shots, extra grain when it wasn’t called for, and having the markings on the backing paper imprinted on the negative, Lomo 800 is the last color negative film I will shoot. I have shot expired Fujifilm NPS160 from 2003 that looked better than Lomo 800. Anyway, enough bad thoughts for Lomo 800. I am not sure what happened, but others got really great shots and in similar lighting conditions. I don’t know, but I have other color negative film stocks to shoot, for way less, that behave as expected. Next 3 months is Ektar and I cannot wait since I have shot it before and it behaves as it should. I am so looking forward to that.
The Frugal Film Project 