I finished my roll of LomoChrome Purple in Ocean City, as planned, and I have some images to share 🙂
As we’ve established, I’m pretty much a beginner at this film photography thing, and so these are not the world’s best Purple photos. They’re not always perfectly exposed (though they are pretty good, because I was checking my digital camera settings with each image and both cameras should have been set the same). They also are quite grainy. I expect some grain in film. I find it charming, even. But it’s excessive in some of these, and I don’t know if it was my fault in the way the film was exposed, or if it was introduced in the scanning process at the lab. As a newbie, I’m willing to accept some of the blame, but I’m not sure I deserve all of it. I’m going to try bringing a roll to another lab soon and see if I like the results any better.
Anyway, here’s what I did:
- I took an image with my digital Canon EOS 80D (a cropped sensor DLSR) and a 35mm prime lens
- I took the same image with Neil’s Minolta XG-M (a 35mm SLR) with the Purple film and a 50mm prime lens
(A 35mm focal length on a cropped sensor camera is roughly equivalent to a full frame 50mm, so the view was basically the same.)
I had both cameras set to 200 ISO and Aperture Priority mode (as that is my favorite mode to shoot in). The Minolta doesn’t have autofocus, so I set the Canon to manual focus as well. That might have been the most challenging part for me. I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to nail focus, since I really haven’t had to do it before. I’ve always relied on autofocus, except in the rare occasions where the camera couldn’t figure out what my main subject was, and I had to take control.
So, the result was: two nearly identical images, taken with the same settings, except one did funky things with colors. According to Lomography, LomoChrome Purple turns greens into purples, blues into greens, and yellows into pinks. I found that to be true for me.
Here are some photos I took around the neighborhood and in the house. You can click on any image for a closer view:
You may notice the power line / monopole images don’t look as similar to each other as my other images do. That’s because I forgot my Canon’s SD card at home, and rather than go back for it, I just took the image with my phone. I couldn’t approximate the same settings, unfortunately, so it’s a bit different. But you get the idea.
We took both cameras to the Great Swamp, which is usually a fabulous place for green stuff. This was late April, though, and there was still a surprising amount of brown. If I brought some LomoChrome Purple to the Swamp now it would look even more like another planet. (Maybe I will do that… I have another roll 😁)
One Saturday while visiting my mother, I took a few pictures around her yard and neighborhood:
And then we went to Ocean City. I’ll have more photos from that trip in another post, but these are all of the Purple ones. In a place like the beach, which is not super green to begin with, I wasn’t expecting to get much purple. I was really mostly after the nifty effect this film would have on the sky. it didn’t disappoint there, for the most part. And a fun bonus was how the sand ended up pink:
And that’s the whole roll!
So, will I do this again? Yes, I will. I already have another roll, as I mentioned, and I think it would do interesting things in the Swamp on a sunny day in the middle of summer. Plus, I have a few ideas for weekend day trips that I’d like to take, and having some otherworldly photos from those places alongside my “normal” images would be fun.
