Lomo Love: A beginning
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 1:36PM 
Treebirds, Downtown Greensburg, PA (Diana +)
I'd wanted a Diana or Holga camera for years. I even blogged about it back in November 2007. Then last March I visited the Lomography store in New York and fell in love with a little black and white number of impish cuteness, a Diana F+ clone named the Snow Cat. Alas, I left the store empty handed, afraid to commit to the plastic world of analog. The camera took medium format film. What was that? Oh, it's the same as 120 film? Um, okay. These kinds of things may be old school, but it was a new world for me.
I fretted over silly what-ifs that I thought were serious issues. What if I couldn't find a good local photo lab to develop this film? (Well then, I'd send it out.) I know I have a low threshold for learning manual, mechanical things. What if I lost patience trying to learn how to choose an aperture and shutter speed? Furthermore, what exactly are aperture and shutter speed? (Okay, I'd just have to learn some new terms and flex my patience muscle.) (I'd learn quite quickly that they're no big deal.) What if I couldn't remember the difference between slide film and negative film? (No prob. I'd make a cheat sheet with all sorts of basic info in my hand dandy Lomo notebook.) What if I didn't like the photos I took? (Or, I could just loosen up and have fun.)
This past December, I helped myself to the world of analog, even though I still didn't know where I'd develop the film, had no idea what an aperture was, or how to remember the difference between types of film. But the Snow Cat arrived, I made that cheat sheet, I allowed myself to be a beginner, and started snapping old school photos.
On my first roll of 16 images, only 10 came out. (It appears that six of them were too over- or underexposed to make out anything but a black or white square. ) Of those ten, I like about half, and love two or three of them. I'd say that's pretty good for a beginner with a cheat sheet and a whole slew of lenses and accessories still waiting to be explored. Let the Lomo adventure continue!
Tell me in the comments how you're allowing yourself to play and be a beginner. Or maybe you long to try something new. What would you do if you weren't fretting?
Reader Comments (7)
i am allowing myself to play and be a beginner at art, all sorts from watercolour to encaustics to sketching. :-)
xo
I am letting myself be a beginner at sweater-knitting - just finished my first one ever - and it's been SO fun. Mostly because I wasn't sure if it would even look like a sweater at all - and I didn't let myself worry about that.
I'm also a novice college professor. Some days I wonder if my students are getting anything valuable from my classes - but other days I know they are.
http://leisahammett.typepad.com/the_journey_with_grace/2010/01/winter-scene-from-windows.html