LomoKino: Charming and Interesting!

Could the LomoKino be the missing piece to unleash the Spielberg and Cameron in all of us?

I don’t actually own a LomoKino, but my flatmate kindly loaned me his for my solo trip to Venice recently (actually he bought a new Fisheye 2 so you get the idea). My first impression was, although the camera is not as sleek or well-built than other Lomography cameras, it gets quite charming when you work the mechanism. For the trip I used 2 rolls of Kodak Ultramax 400; I figured that the weather would get quite gloomy during the trip.

The camera itself is actually pretty portable and doesn’t take up a lot of space. When I go about shooting with it, I tried to have at least 6 – 8 frames per scene; my flatmate experimented using LomoKino as a camera and shoots a frame per scene, and it appears more like a slideshow than a movie.

The best part of this camera, of course, is the process: the look of others while you wind the crank is almost certain to guarantee a smile! The focus button is very convenient too use as well. However, I find the pop-up viewfinder quite adorable but I didn’t use it at all; I do use it for a preview before I wind the crank though.

I maintained my aperture between 8 and 11; in some scenes they turned out quite dark and I should have opened it all the way to 5.6. Overall, the colour is quite dull but still viewable; not bad for 3 days of gloomy skies. But as seen in the photo below, when the sun finally appeared on my departing day, the colour turns out to be really vibrant and sharp.

Indoor subjects with spotlight illumination is also captured quite sharply with the LomoKino.

Overall, as individual single images, never expect the LomoKino to produce very crisp images. Its main purpose is to capture a series of images to produce stop motion video, so as long as the images are captured well in a moving sequence, then it has done it’s job. When you lower your expectation, sharply captured subjects will be a happy accident.

Production process is, not to say difficult, but takes some time. My lab scanned the photos into fours like a SuperSampler and I had the individual shots cropped in Photoshop. With 2 rolls of film I got a total of 238 frames. I used the Windows Live Movie Maker: very, very easy to use and I had fun pairing the music too. See below for the result!

This is definitely one of the most interesting cameras I’ve ever used: it changes the way you approach your subject because instead of a single shot, you will be trying to tell a story about it. I would really like to see this camera being used in video production courses!

Enter a new analogue dimension with the LomoKino. Lomography’s own 35mm analogue movie camera allows you to capture action and immortalize your story on film! Shoot 144 frames on any 35mm film and create your own cinematic masterpieces. Want to watch your movie the old-school way? We also offer the LomoKino and LomoKinoscope package!

written by shuttersentinel17 on 2011-12-22 #gear #videos #video #review #motion #venice #400-iso #stop #lomography #italy #kodak #ultramax #user-review #requested #lomokino