Posts Tagged ‘lomography’
Of Quirkiness, Popsicles, and Colour-Blind Film
We go off on the wayward, weird path, pointing out quirky happenings in the world of Photography no more than once a week. Well, there’s so much weird, quirky stuff going on that we just have to follow up The Good, the Mad, and the Chuckly from earlier this week with another post treating you to off-the-wall news from yesterday and today. Aquarius in his first week must be a joker!
Quirky Cerise
PetaPixel even starts the title of a photo-article with the word ‘quirky’: Quirky Portraits of People Surrounded by Swarms of Hanging Objects. (See how bad things are getting?) It features the photographs of Cerise Doucède.
Doucède’s photographs are truly, well, quirky, ranging to weird. They are also reminiscent of surreal painting. Perfectly natural portraits of persons are offset by a variety of objects in midair in front of and around the subject. Some persons are clearly put out by said objects while others find them amusing! Which are you?
Colour-Blind Film
Aquarius is such a bad influence that even staid BJP makes one of our weird-and-quirky posts! Once upon a time, King Kodak used to produce and “infrared” film called “Aerochrome” that was “intended for various aerial photographic applications, such as vegetation and forestry surveys,” and similar serious applications. It had the endearing trait of turning cool greens into popping purples.
Now, Lomography is bringing out their “LomoChrome Purple 400 film” which is neither infrared nor meant for aerial and/or serious applications. It does retain Aerochrome’s endearing trait of converting greens into magentas and purples, however! Click the link to see a few sample shots and to access a couple more links if you’re into The Colour Purple.
Popsicle-Stick Cameras
It’s the height of summer and popsicles would be most welcome. What’s more, we should save the popsicle sticks because you can . . . build a camera out of them.
Maxim Grew used a Polaroid film holder, card stock, duct tape, and aforementioned popsicle sticks to build a working camera! Grew even demonstrates how well his camera works with a photo or two. In case you’d like to build one, he freely shares his fabrication process and trade secrets.
Offbeat Day: The Silly, the Spooky, and the Sad
Silly
Bad photographs are making a comeback because . . . well, because apparently they’re cool! The fashion world strikes again. I know it sounds silly but it’s true.
The photography techniques and ideals of the day are now “blurry shots, shadows, overexposure” according to Anne-Marie Conway, who seems (at least a little) enraptured by this retrograde development. Known as ‘Lomography’, boiled down to its essentials this Art & Science centres around deliberate use of el cheapo cameras to simply point and click, and then see what happens.
The boxes of choice for the hip and cool (and silly) crowd are Diana+, Holga and Lomo LC-A (which are said to represent a serious threat to Nikon, Canon and Olympus’s long-term viability). Evidently these are ultra-complicated rigs, for Create Studios offers a half-day Holga and Diana Workshop, according to Conway. No doubt it will be expensive but I am sure it will be well worth the stiff price so I am booking a place . . .
Spooky
Talk about this lomography business’s “burry shots” and “shadows,” Julie Griffin’s blurry shots of shadows from the spirit world represent a much more honest endeavour than the lomography fraud, er, I mean fad.
Cathy Torrisi writes about Griffin’s childhood in a purported haunted house in which para-normal activity was . . . normal. Swaying chandeliers and swinging doors aroused a desire in Griffin to photograph the spooks and she set about her task with whole-hearted dedication.
Spooky Goffe House is said to be one of the more in-demand retreats for sophisticated ghosties and Griffin tried to hunt down a few with notable success: “Last week, she set up her camera with a motion detector inside the Goffe House when no one was there, and it did go off,” reports Torrisi. The results of Griffin’s ghost-hunting exploits are at http://www.ghostlyphotographs.com/. Definitely worth a look-see.
Sad
We move from hunting ghosts to hunting elephants, and from the ghosts of humans to the ghosts of elephants – slaughtered, mass-murdered elephants.
Ivory, though illegal under CITES, is big business. NatGeo’s sad story, Blood Ivory – Ivory Worship, exposes the Elephant Killing Fields and reveals that the outlawed ‘Blood Ivory’ trade runs into the unknown ‘multi-tons’ and spans the Middle East and Far East.
Here’s the photography connection: attached to the article is a photo album by Brent Stirton. It captures some low points in the transit route of illegal ivory, including a nice pic of the ‘Elephant Monk’ outside his temple.
The killers will surely stop someday . . . that sad day when all the tuskers are gone.
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