Every fortnight on Flickr the user group for my camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 (catchy, no?), holds a themed competition and the one about to close had the theme lomography in black and white.

Lomography derives its name from a Russian camera company, LOMO, who specialised in producing cheap cameras that could be used by anyone. The emphasis was on snap-shots – capturing a particlar moment in bright, vibrant colours and it found a following quickly amongst art students and those interested in candid photography and photo v?rit?. The cheapness of the camera led to defects, flares and vigenetting but these were embraced in the final photo giving it a slightly abstract feel.

The idea of the Flickr competition was to take the ideas behind Lomography, those of snap-shot images taken without great thought for composition, and apply it to photographs taken with a technically superior camera. The 10 rules of lomography, taken from the Lomographic Society International were stated:

1. Take your LOMO everywhere you go and whenever you go.
2. Use it any time – day or night.
3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but a part of it.
4. Shoot from the hip.
5. Approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible.
6. Don’t think.
7. Be fast.
8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you’ve captured on film.
9. You don’t have to know afterwards, either.
10. Don’t worry about the rules.

It has been a challenge to deliberately shun photographic forethought, to snap at abritrary times, at unusual angles and not worrying about focus or exposure, but it has been an interesting experience and one that has yielded some interesting images.

Taking the picture was only the first half of the process for me. I wanted to take it a step further and give the pictures a truly lomographic look. I therefore turned to my image editing and manipulation software, the open-source GIMP programme.

For this I found several plug-ins that emulated the lomographic effect and experimented with them to achieve differing effects.

The Diana-Holga Script

This seems to be script most talked about on Flickr. I tried this out with the photo of St Nick’s (above) to achieve a very satsifying lomographic effect. The script does an excellent job of applying vignetting, and adds the aged border. What I don’t like is the amount of blur it tends to add which gives all the bold lines a ghostly shadow. The blur can be toned down in the options but it does not seem to go away completely. However for a truly distressed look this script works well.

Lomo-look settings: Stretch=1; Zoom=0; Contrast=30; Vignetting=50; Blur=0; Mask: no

Other Lomo Scripts

The photo at the top of this post is my competition entry. Here I used two different lomo scripts to get the effect I wanted – greater contrast and vignetting without the motion blur and aging effect the D-H script added. The two I used were Goose24′s Lomo Script and Francois Le Lay’s Lomo Script. I found that both were required to gain both the desired levels of contrast and the vignetting and am very pleased with the final result.

Next week’s competition theme is likely to be something completely different, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be trying any lomography for a while as it does seem to be a difficult thing to genuinely achieve, but I think it is an interesting technique and I’ve enjoyed exploring it’s potential. Next time (i.e. during the summer) I’ll try it in colour and go for some of that super-saturation!

technorati tags:lomography, gimp, scripts, flickr, photography, b&w, panasonic-fz7