Lomography

My Lomo Story
written by dirklancer on March 15th, 2009 , 8 comments (8 votes)

At the bottom of the full page spread was a picture of a funky camera – it had four lenses and a ripcord! I looked around the lunchroom to see if anyone was looking, then I tore the page out of the paper and stuck it in my pocket. When I got home, I showed my wife the picture of the ‘Super Sampler’ – she raised her eyebrows, a sure sign that she wasn’t interested. I forgot about the camera over the next few months, but to my amazement (!) my wife had ordered the Super Sampler from lomo.com and put it under the Christmas tree (she is SO awesome!).

Over the next few months I snapped so many pictures with this wonderful invention – my infant son, my first house, a family wedding, a vacation to the west coast; but then I was a little too rough with it one day and broke the spring. I was heart broken (see my SuperSampler review), but I moved on.

For a couple of years I ventured into digital photography, and only occasionally flipped through my box of lovely lomographs.

In 2007, I found that I had gotten to a point where I was becoming overwhelmed with thousands of mediocre images on a memory card, and I needed to try something different. I took a class at a local art gallery – learning how to create Polaroid image transfers; I loved it! Then, after I had bought several old Polaroid cameras, I was devastated by the announcement that Polaroid would cease production of their pack film. What next?!

This is when I found Lomo for second time. A new store in town was selling Dianas, Fisheyes, Action Samplers, and Holgas! I remembered the joy that the Super Sampler brought to me – and added the Fisheye to my Christmas list! (My wife just smiled…)

Now I own over 20 cameras – and at least 19 of them are analogue! There are still a few that I’d like to get, but I’m beginning to think that will never change :)

-dirklancer