Lomography

There seem to be a trend moving toward gritty emotive photography in some niches of design, it would make sense give the graphics trend of the warn/authentic look.

At the head of all this is, Lomography, a wonderful world of crude photography For those of you who don't know, Lomo cameras are these crazy old cameras that were originally designed in eastern Europe in 1960's (and haven't really changed since). Lomo pictures are unique in the way they look. The best way to tell is by seeing some; below is a Lomo shot I took a while back while driving down the interstate in Atlanta. The shots are gritty, have an odd coloring, and are often a bit blurry with aggressive compositions.


There's an entire culture that goes along with Lomography. Click here to go the lomography.com about site to learn some more about it. The idea behind the Lomo is to take the camera around with you everywhere, and capture everyday life in fascinating ways. The Lomo camera comes with a rule book and one of the rules is that there are no rules. You are encouraged to shoot from the hip and not worry about using a view finder, and to shoot quickly and without thinking about it. I like to think of Lomography being analogous to gesture sketches in drawing.

One of the other things I love about Lomography are Lomo-Collages. I don't know why this caught on in Lomo society, but Lomo kids always put their photos in these fascinating collages. Here's one I found on a website that used actual average photo prints placed in an amazing array:



Other collages are done with photoshop and varying scale and stuff like that, but they are equally fun. Here's one I did with some of my Lomo shots (click on it to be taken to my photo website so you can see a larger version).