All That Jazz

My latest passion is the Lomography photography. For those of you who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, please check out this site. In short: Lomography is something like taking snapshot photos with old film cameras. Or with any photographic equipment. The idea is to get somewhat artistic shots fast, without thinking too much and more important: without too much digital post processing. The name Lomography comes from the old Soviet made Lomo cameras with plastic lenses and overall bad construction. You couldn't get a decent photo out of it, but taking photos with it was extremely fun.

And that's just what Lomography means to me: having fun by taking photos. I've shot for several stock photo agencies for years and technical perfection is very important in stock photos. Also, choosing the right camera body, lenses, flashes, tripods and other gimmicks produces the best results. Not to mention subject, angle, color balance and so on.

With Lomography you can forget all about the technical stuff. And you can leave the shutter speeds and apertures for the camera to decide. The world is full of subjects. You can see wonderful photo stories everywhere. And you don't have to think about the sellability of the photos. Just take a camera you can easily carry around and take the photos.

To me, it's like playing jazz music. You know the rules, but you don't have to obey them. Play freely and have fun. The listeners may not always enjoy the results, but that doesn't really matter. Very liberating!

And Lomography helps with stock photography, too. I've taken lomo shots and noticed that these might work as stock photos, too. Then I've gotten back to the location with my DSLR and taken a more rule-obeying photo.

What equipment do I use when taking these Lomography pictures? Here comes the fun part. I have several film cameras that would suit wonderfully for this kind of purpose. But, I've grown up in the time when film photography was the only photography there was. Developing film and printing the photos was relatively expensive. Every time I heard the shutter click, in my mind I saw money fading away.

That's why I don't use film any more. Unfortunately, that's over for me. So, I use my phone camera instead. To me, the phone cameras are pretty much toys, no matter how many megapixels they have. Usually they have tiny plastic lenses and a very small sensor. They are perfect for lomography, don't you think.

However, the phone cameras tend to sharpen the photos a lot and do all kind of software magic to get the photos look perfect. And I don't want perfect looking photos. So, I use a little app to make the photos look more like lomo photos. There are quite a lot of Lomography apps available, but my favourite is the Retro Camera for Android.

When I told this to my friend, he shook his head and said: So, you have a very expensive camera which could take brilliant photos and you use a piece of software to make the photos look crappy? Yes. That's right. You got the point!

You can see my Lomography photos here and here.

Huawei P10 Smartphone

My current phone is the older flagship of Huawei. It has a twin camera with Leica lenses. It should be pretty impressive. And I admit, I like taking photos with it. The camera is pretty fast, too. It's almost as fast as my EOS 350D. And I've always dreamed of walking in the street with a Leica camera with me like Henri Cartier-Bresson. I wonder what the new flagship, the P20 with triple camera is like.

Read more about the phone here.