Lomography Sprocket Rocket
What better way to look to the future than by heading into the past and shooting more film?
The lovely people at Lomography UK let me play with some of their toys and one of my favourites was the Sprocket Rocket. Like the rest of the Lomo range, it's a plastic camera, with VERY basic controls, that exposes the image onto the whole of the negative, resulting in those lovely sprocket holes being visible on the final image.
Coming from the wonders of the formidable Nikon D5, a camera that has "Normal" or "Bulb" as a choice of shutter speed, and "sun" or "cloud" for aperture is a bit of a shock. Being film, it could prove costly if your experimentation doesn't prove very accurate, but I was pleased to find only a few duff frames out of the two films I've pushed through it so far. The shot above was hand-held on "bulb" as a woman waited for service in a Victoria Park cafe. The exposure time was guesswork, but it caught exactly the amount of rim light that I was looking for.
Chatting to top chap Oli Scarff about his experimentation with the same model, he agreed that it's a bit of a shock going from £1000+ optics to a plastic lens, but the results are really satisfying. Lens flare, soft patches, distortion; all that good stuff is in there, with no real guarantee of what's going to affect each unit due to it's manufacturing process. The flare is good fun to play with, as the first shot in the post shows. You're not in the world of multi-coated elements here, Toto...
Available from the Lomography store for a mere £50, I can recommend it as a great way to find something new in your photography. In these days of instant results and "guaranteed image gratification", reverting to film is a great way to make sure you actually do know what you're doing. That might sound a bit harsh but we all get a bit lazy with our metering when we can check the picture straight away. Set yourself a challenge and hop onboard the rocketship.
