I snap

[imomus]

Last week I needed a new digital camera and saw a neat one -- something called an I Snap Camcorder AV-60, made by "Camson Japan" -- in the window of an electronics store on 5th Avenue. It was pretty hard to convince the burly men in the store -- I think they were Mexicans -- to part with the camera. It was the last of its kind, they said, and they weren't sure where its box and power supply were. They showed me lots of other cameras, but something about the Camson intrigued me. It had very tiny dimensions, recorded sound separately from video (good for podcasts and interviews) and had a flat base and swivel screen (both essential for tripod-free portraits). I haggled the Mexicans "down" to $120.



This camera has turned out to be mysterious, terrible, and great. I can't find a single reference to it, or its allegedly Japanese (but probably Chinese) maker, anywhere on the internet. Nobody on Flickr, for instance, uses a Camson. What's more, the pictures it takes are pretty awful: there's a blue cast on everything, the flash is pathetically inadequate, it's terrible in low light. As a result, I tend to take the kind of pictures I took in the early days of digital photography: full-on, broad daylight images of flat, graphic-designlike subjects. When I do take indoor shots, I'll often have a thumb in the region of the lens and have to boost the contrast (and therefore the grain) enormously in Photoshop, as in the shot above, taken at Jan's udon party on Sunday night.

The great part is that bad cameras sometimes take much more interesting images than good cameras. I suppose it's an extension of the lo-fi aesthetic -- why would someone choose 8-bit sounds, for instance, when they could have "sophisticated" digital synthtones capable of burbling across the sound spectrum in quad? Well, as the newly-released Germlin THRASHR album demonstrates (and Germlin is Joe Howe, also seen in the picture above, and of course responsible for the sound of the Joemus album), there's a ton of character in cheap and cheerful low resolution sounds.



Joe and his girlfriend Emma are Berlin residents now, and today they're biking down to Oderbergerstrasse to visit Bonanza Coffee Heroes. I'd join them, but Hisae and I have to head back to Jan's apartment: we're covering it for the next edition of Apartamento, the "everyday life interiors magazine" which applies lo-fi -- or perhaps "slow-fi" -- principles in its approach to design. Hisae is taking the pictures. Not with my new Camson, but her old analog Nikon. When it comes to capturing funky ambience, you don't want too funky a camera.

Joe and Momus play together at West Germany on June 24th.

Comments

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

It's easy enough to fake the Lomo effect in software (http://ocaoimh.ie/2005/02/26/gimp-lomo-examples/). One could even write a script to auto-Lomofy one's digital photos prior to uploading, to further rankle the hipsters.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Basically all you have to do is add some sharpness, max out the contrast, darken the shadows, blow out the brights, give it a red, green, or blue tint, and maybe add a vignette for authenticity.

If most of the lomography people I've met or read the thoughts of weren't such hypocritical douchebags, I wouldn't have such a problem with the "movement" in general. What they don't seem to realize is that their photos only really impress two sets of people: those who don't know the technical details of how such a visual effect is achieved, and other lomographers. Any great pictures I've ever seen in that style still required that the photographer on the other end have some idea what he/she was doing in the process.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

From what I gather, Lomography is less about the superior aesthetic qualities of these cheap cameras than it is about them being a shibboleth that bestows the positional good of cool, a proof of being in the know and going to the extra effort of carrying around a film camera that's crappy in a highly specific way.

Anyone can buy a digital camera, and anyone with money can buy a high-end medium-format camera, but being a Lomographer requires (a) a modest amount of money, (b) being in the know (though these days it's not much of an issue, given that Urban Outfitters have been selling Lomos to suburban kids (and donating a chunk of the profits to the Republican Party, but that's another issue) for years; remember, cool is a positional good, and everyone being cool is logically impossible), and (c) having the cultural reference points that value the particular choice of a particular cheap 35mm camera.

I'm told that the Diana is the hipster lofi film camera these days. That and a stock of expired 120mm film (going cheap, as the manufacturers didn't anticipate their clientele going digital).

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I'm shocked that http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com hasn't done an entry on Lomo cameras.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

This is the only SWPL entry I've ever liked. (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/18/70-difficult-breakups/)

That said, yeah. They really should cover Lomo.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I mean, I should be clear. I don't purport to be any better than these people, in a general sense. Instead of being a whore for cheap, half-broken film cameras, I spend my time lusting after expensive lenses for my digital SLR.

What irks me is the fact that the Lomo people go out of their way to promote this amateur, no-rules, anti-formalist aesthetic, but then they do a 180 and spout this really essentialist view about film, and how it's "just more real," etc ... as though digital imagery doesn't consist of the exact same process, only instead of light hitting a piece of film, it hits a sensor.

come come.

[(Anonymous)]

yes yes yes but your missing the point.there is no magic formula for creativity.think for yourselves ...innovate...truly create.if every one can manage that then art forms would be so much more diverse.not just homogeneous think tanks masquerading as vanguard epoch defining pioneers...blah blah blah .but you get ma point.