Digital Colorsplash
Lomography has been covered at length before, but people keep giving me fantastic tips about lomo photos, so I just can’t help but going back to the topic again and again.
This time, I got a tip about someone who’s made a digital version of the Lomo Coloursplash – essentially a cheap camera with a coloured gel in front of the flashgun.
What a brilliant idea!
A Lomo Colorsplash is a weird little camera… As they put it themselves: “The opportunity of magically applying the ‘wrong’ colors to your image, just like the new and old masters, is adding an abstract edge to Lomography as a whole. It’s adding a new level of randomly generated interpretative possibilities, one that has never existed in the everyday artistic lives of Lomographers before.”
It’s an old concept, but it’s a good one, which is why the Colorsplash is selling reasonably well. In the age of digital photography, who still uses these things, though? Well, we sure don’t, so we were roused by Pikol’s account on how to make your own SLR colorsplash camera. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and it’s heaps of fun. Just the way we like it.
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Insights, suggestions and comments
No reason to buy a $50 piece of shit (I bought the $50 piece of shit, so I feel confident in my standing to pass judgement on it). You can buy a reloadable “disposable” cameras and put coloured cling wrap or lighting gel sample packet sheets over the flash many times over for the price of this thing and actually get better build quality.
Gels over flashes wasn’t LSI’s idea. The only relationship it has to “Lomography” is that LSI built a piece of crap and charges way too much money for it, just like they do for the rest of their range.
the camera is good. i found it @ a store called urban outfitters for $25… if you can get that kind of deal go for it.
I have made my own cheap Colorsplash imitations with good results, but the Colorsplash has a few features that make it a good choice for lomography. First, it’s fast and easy to change the gels over the flash. The most efficient way I came up with for filtering the flash on my Colorsplash imitations was to use a rubber band to hold the filters in place. Even then, changing filters is much faster on the Colorsplash, so it makes it more likely that you will use a variety of colors in your shots and might even give you the opportunity to make a shot that you might have otherwise missed because you were messing with the filters. Second, it has a “B” setting. It is very hard to find a cheap camera with a “B” shutter setting. Third, it uses “Rear Curtain” synchronization for the flash when used with the “B” setting. It’s very hard to find any camera, cheap or expensive, film or digital, with “Rear Curtain” synchronization. As with all Lomographic Society cameras, it’s possible to get similar results with other cameras or digital manipulation, but it’s often difficult, time-consuming, or expensive.
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