A Funkaoshi Production

The Lomography Fisheye

   28 January 2006, evening time

Shima bought me a Lomography Fisheye camera when she was in New York city a few weeks back. The Lomographic Society got famous by selling Lomo LC-A cameras, but now they sell other cheap cameras at boutique prices. This fisheye camera is one of many cameras you can now buy online at the Lomography website.

Now, I can’t knock the Lomographic Society for their business practices; like any business they are trying to earn money. (This quote from a photo.net thread on Lomo’s always cracks me up: ”[The Lomographic Society] only exists to make money? Oh darn! I thought it was a charity the same as Leica. I have been gulled again.”) The Lomo LC-A, the camera that made the Lomography movement famous, should sell for less than $50 bucks on eBay, as this seems to be the going price for soviet-era camera clones. (The Lomo LC-A is a copy of the Cosina CX-2.) Unfortunately, because every hipster and their mother has to own a LC-A, they usually sell for closer to $200 now. There are a plethora of junky camera’s out there, but people are only interested in LC-A’s for the most part. As such, I still don’t own a LC-A. I can’t bring myself to pay $200 for a junky camera.

This Fisheye Camera has been fun to shoot with. You don’t really need to worry about anything when taking a shot. The field of view is so huge, if you point it in the general direction of what you want a photo of, chances are the subject will end up in the frame. Because of the focal length and the f-stop the camera is fixed at, pretty much everything should be in focus when you take a photo. You can take shots from about 10mm away and expect them to be in focus. That said, the camera has a few limitations which have resulted in some poor pictures thus far. First, it has a fixed shutter speed or 1/100 of a second, and fixed aperture of f8; as such you need a lot of light to expose a picture on the camera. The camera comes with a built in flash, but because of the position of the flash on the camera, you get some pretty annoying shadows in your photos. (The lens itself usually casts a shadow on your pictures for example.) I haven’t tried the camera out on a sunny day yet, and I think the results I get will be much better with more light.

Since using this camera, I feel like getting a point and shoot film camera. The Yashica T4 and Olympus Stylus Epic are apparently both excellent point and shoot cameras in terms of optics. Till then, this fisheye is keeping me entertained.

Photography