Hasta La Gadget!

To most of us, Lomo is the camera brand that inspired a gazillion digital knock-offs, apps that mash and mix your cellphone photos into something that would have been rejected by every picture editor in the days of film. Today, Lomo is ready to remind us just how cool the analog approach can still be, with the brand new Lomo LC-Wide.

The new camera looks a lot like the LC-A, but comes with some extras. First is the new lens, which puts the “wide” in the name. It’s a super wideangle 17mm lens, vs the LC-A’s already wide 32mm. To get an idea of how wide this is, once a lens gets to 16mm it is usually a fisheye.

You can also choose some different formats. The regular, longish 35mm full-frame is still there, joined by half frame (for up to 72 shots on a roll) and square (24 x 24mm).

The specs are reassuringly crappy. The shutter speed tops out at 1/500 sec and the maximum aperture is a light-sapping ƒ4.5. ISO settings run from 100 to 1600, but you can still use any faster or slower film should you want to (I recommend Ilford’s Delta 3200 black and white. It has awesome grain and I pretty much always had a roll of it in my old Leica M6).

You also get a hotshoe for flash, a tripod socket, a threaded hole for a cable release, and both program and manual exposure.

The only thing about the Lomo LC-Wide that isn’t cheap is the price. It’ll cost you $390/£350/€350, depending on where you are in the world. I still kind of want one, though.

Lomo LC-Wide [Lomo via Gizmodo’s Kat Hannaford]

Like the inner workings of magnets, the Polaroid’s internals are a magical mystery

Frikkin’ instant films? How do they work? Well, if you had thought to ask the good folks at Phototjojo instead of just shouting your mouth off like that, you would have found the answer in their excellent Photo Science guide. Spoiler: you don’t have to shake it.

You may have known that each Polaroid picture contains the chemicals needed to process it. What you probably didn’t know were the details. The large bottom border of a Polaroid doesn’t just give it its iconic shape. It also contains pouches of chemicals. When the photo is ejected from the camera it is squeezed between two rollers which burst the bags and smear the chemicals onto the photo, developing it.

You can see this for yourself by taking an unused Polaroid and squeezing the juice from these pustules with your fingers. The chemicals can be squidged around like paint inside the photo. I used to do this when I was a wasteful teenager (and photography student), and you can get some cool — but only semi-permanent — effects.

Sure, you may have know this already, but the real reason for posting about this was to use Photojojo’s excellent illustrations, above. Head over to the blog post to find out all about the camera obscura, photo paper, pinhole cameras and color filters. Who said learning can’t be fun?

Photo Science: How 5 Photo Techniques Work & How You Can Play With Them! [Phototjojo]

See Also:

• Polaroid Fans Plan to Restart Instant Film Production
• Frikkin' Magnets. How Do They Work?

Tilt-shift on the cheap from NeinGrenze

The march of the plastic, retro-tastic crappy-cams continues with the frankly pretty cool-looking NeinGrenze. In keeping with the genre, this camera will add a novelty tweak to any image you take, moving away from the perfect sharpness of the digital SLR and closer to the analog surprises of film.

In this case, the gimmick is tilt-shift, the effect that makes full-sized scenes seem miniature. The proper way to do this is to use the “tilt” part of a shifting architectural lens to change the plane of focus. This keeps a very narrow strip of the picture sharp. And because our brains are uses to seeing such shallow sharpness only when our eyes get very close to something, they interpret these photos as pictures of tiny people, cars and buildings.

You can also get the effect in software, but it never really works.

The NeinGrenze (“No Limit”) 5000T is a digicam with a tilting lens built-in. With it, you can take 5MP snaps or 640 x 480 AVI video through a real, albeit cheap, tilting lens. Not only is the effect far more likely to look real, you get the grungy look you’d expect from such a plasticky marvel. You can also add in-camera filters: vivid, sepia and monochrome join the normal mode.

Power comes from a li-ion battery, focus is fixed and if you want to zoom, you’ll need to do some walking.

For $150, you could just buy a “proper” digicam and gussy up those pictures later, but where’s the fun in that? Available in Japan and Taiwan.

NeinGrenze product page [(Warning: Flash) NeinGrenze via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Plungercam: DIY Tilt-Shift Lens
• Lensbaby Tilt Transformer Marries Nikon Lenses to Micro Four …
• Lomo-fy Your iPhone 3G With Brando's Telescope
• Gorgeous Slow Camera Box Is Like an Analog Instagram

This automatic lens cap will change your life

Taking a lens cap off to snap a photo and then replacing it afterwards is such a chore. Is there any good reason we should have to do something so tedious in an age of Roombas and shoot-to-kill remote control drones? No. Which is why the folks at Japanese company Un-Ltd have come up with an automatic, retractable lens cover for the Olympus XZ1.

The cap assembly fixes onto the lens by way of Allen-wrench grub screws, and sits in place keeping dust and debris away from your precious glass. Then, when you switch the camera on, the lens extends and pushes away the three leaves that make up the front face of the cap. They sit off to the side and then spring back into place when the lens retracts.

And it costs $72.

The units are hand made, and surely fill a market niche, but why doesn’t the XZ1 have this already? With interchangeable lenses, you can understand the use of lens caps. But surely a compact digicam should have it built in. Canon’s G series manages it, and so do many others.

Still, if you do want one (and don’t go for the alternative of leaving a UV filter permanently attached) then dust off your PayPal account and head over to the Un-Ltd site to spend your hard-earned ¥5,800, plus shipping.

Olympus XZ-automatic retractable lens cap [Un-Ltd via DP Review]

See Also:

• Home-Made Protection: Rear Lens-Cap Pad for Stackable Storage …
• DIY Lens Cap Saver Is Ingeniously Inventive
• White-Balance Lens Cap. Possibly Pointless?
• Stereo Lens-in-a-Cap for 3D Digital Photography

Analog apes digital apes analog. The colors of Impossible’s new Polaroid film are wonderful. Photo Steve Maniscalco

If you want to shoot Polaroids, forget about Polaroid. The company is now little more than a label slapped onto plastic junk, which it then tries to make palatable by paying Lady Gaga to say nice things about it.

What you need is to find an old Polaroid camera (the proper ones that spit out the iconic square photos) and load it up with Impossible film. And analog-retro fans are in luck today, as the Impossible Project has launched a new film pack, the PX 680 Color Shade.

PX 680 is much like Instagram for real photos. The colors are vivid and sometimes rather skewed, and odd things can happen thanks to the fact that the emulsion remains sensitive to light for the first few moments after it pops out into the world. If you shield it from bright light after its birth and coddle it for four minutes, you’ll be rewarded with stunningly bright colors.

You have to follow the instructions, though. These suggest shooting straight into a box, shooting in a warm place to get brighter colors, and overcranking the exposure slightly to saturate the colors. And the pictures will continue to change for a few days after shooting. Try getting that kind of thing out of your digital camera.

The film works with Polaroid 600 cameras, as well as the SX 70 if it has a neutral density filter (the speed of the film is ISO600). A pack of eight shots will cost you $22. Available now.

Color Shade product page [Impossible Project. Thanks, Marlene!]

See Also:

• Impossible Project
• New, Vintage Polaroid Cameras Sell Out in Hours
• Rebel Film Developers Give New Hope to Polaroid Fans
• Photo Enlargers Loom Like Dinosaurs of the Film Age