9 December 2008

Shoot better Lomo pics - Making the Lomography Camera more predictable

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Some time back I received the Lomography Fisheye 2 Camera as a gift and decided that I should get to know it a little better. So I went about with it, shooting whatever that deserves the funky Lomography treatment.

My first roll from the Lomo Fisheye

Horrors of horrors
It didn't turn out too well as you can see from the image above. Most of the shots were under-exposed and not worth a second look, unless you are are looking at a way to take more properly exposed shots, that is.

It consequently got me thinking how I could make my Fisheye 2 shots more properly exposed.

Going back to the trinity of photography
A quick summary of this trinity of photography - Aperture, Shutter Speed and Film Speed are correlated in a way that when one value goes down, the other 2 values need to go up. For example, if the aperture becomes smaller, either the shutter speed could be lowered or the film speed can be increased.

From the instruction manual of the Fisheye 2, the aperture is fixed at F8.
For the shutter speed, the normal (N) mode functions at 100th of a second (1/100) while bulb (B) mode gives full control over it. Multiple exposure (MX) allows for a shot to be taken on top of the previous shot.
Film speed is fixed with every roll that is loaded. For my case, I had used ISO 400 film.

Metering with a digital camera
So with the second roll of film loaded into the Fisheye 2, I also brought along a digital camera. On it I set its ISO to 400 and aperture to F8, to match the fixed settings of the Lomo camera. Thereafter, it is the discipline of framing the shot and checking the resulting shutter speed on the digital camera and then attempting to match that value on the Lomo camera. For me, I only use the bulb mode if the shutter speed on the digital camera is slower than the default 1/100 second. The result: much much better exposed shots as you can see below.

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So any lomography camera users out there who has an even better and simpler method of getting properly exposed shots?

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