...is the motto of one of my hobbies: Lomography.
Lomography is an analog photography movement and community. Its name is inspired by the Russian optics manufacturer LOMO PLC of Saint Petersburg that created and produced a camera called LOMO LC-A Compact Automat.
In the early 90ies, a group of Viennese students discovered the Lomo LC-A and were "charmed by the unique, colorful, and sometimes blurry" images that the camera produced. In 1992 the Lomographic Society was founded and its members presented their works at a number of international art exhibitions .The Viennese students and fuonders of the Lomographic Society wanted to make this fantastic little camera available to as many people as possible, so they flew to St. Petersburg to work out a contract for the worldwide distribution of the LC-A.
By now, Lomography has produced and marketed an entire line of their own analog cameras. Most of them produce special photographic effects such as "oversaturated colors or blurring", usually considered bad in "normal" photography.
I have always been interested in photography. When a former classmate then introduced me to the world of Lomography, I bought myself a Diana Mini camera at the next possible occasion, impulsive as I can be. :-) I hadn't used an analog camera for about ten years at that time, and knew next to nothing about aperture, exposure or ISO-settings.
Thank God the camera settings were very simple. You could only choose "sunny" or "cloudy" (which meant different aperture settings) and about five focus settings, ranging from 0.6m to infinite. I put in a roll of film and started to shoot. After having taken about 36 shots, I brought it to the lab to have my pictures developed. In a world of instant gratification, having to wait for your pictures is a very peculiar yet exciting feeling.
The results were...well, surprising (see below). Apparently, I hadn't wound the film properly so that all the pictures were overlapping. I was very disappointed until my classmate told me that her first three films had been completely blank.
The following films I shot turned out a lot less messy. In hindsight, though, I like my first pictures more than the latter ones because they were so surprising and experimental.
Some months later I bought a second camera (the original Lomo LC-A with which this movement started), and only a few days after having received it I got an email saying that one of my first (messy) pictures had won a competition on the Lomography website! My price? Another Lomo camera :-)
If you asked me which of the three cameras I own is my favourite, I couldn't tell. I like the LC-A because it is simple to handle and produces less blurry pictures than the Diana Mini. Besides, it has beautiful vignetting (that means that the edges of a picture are darker than the middle), especially if you use a technique called "cross-processing", where you develop the film in the "wrong" chemicals.
The Diana Mini, on the other hand, looks adorably cute, is unbreakable because it is so simple and its results are always surprising - you never know what you'll get.
If I want to take pictures of something important, I would never only take a Lomo camera with me because the outcome is too unpredictable (and chances are that there is no outcome at all...). Lomography is simply a means of having fun with photography. You can create wonderful pieces of art by disobeying usual rules of "professional" photography. Besides, the cameras' adorable look makes everyone smile or pose for a picture, I swear :-)
Live dangerously - go analog!
