Lomoliscious

Ah, the Lomo - obvioiusly the product of a mind warped by too much "e" and countless hours of pulsing, hypnotic house music, but still cuddly and open enough to call a cantankerous old coot friend.

My experience with Lomo is not all that long, but very colorful (tee hee, couldn't resist the wickedly clever pun there). I've played around with almost all of their varieties: the Action Sampler, that ultra stylin' partyboy of the multi-shutter, time-lapse set; the Pop-9, the glam-rocker of the multiple exposure photo; the Loreo 3D, the mature, graying-at-the-temples throwback to the old stereoscopic daugerrotypes; and the Kompakt Automat, the iron-clad beast of Soviet-era technology. As the list implies, the LomoNation is filled with whimsical apparati, all with the implicit intention of bringing youthful entusiasm and that rarefied unintentional & error-originated art back to the land of photography.

And they are also designed as a last, giant, erect middle-finger in the face of digital cameras. As any Lomophile will arrogantly pontificate if given half a chance, Lomos are for people who thrill in the spontaneity of the shot, and who feel Ansel Adams was an anal-retentive old blowhard who ruined every goddamn picture he took by over obsessing about shadow, form, light, and composition. Not Lomolians, no way. These are on the go people, too hip and busy to worry about whether the subject is in frame or not. In fact, the company propaganda proudly shoves this sort of youthful impatience in your face, all the while holding tightly to the luddite love of the cool warmth of an aluminum roll of 35mm film.

But the drivel I am now typing while I am supposed to be porductively doing other things is supposed to be about the ColorSplash camera, not the crevices and fissures of Lomo-Philosophy. So I should get on with it.

Indeed.

I first laid eyes on the sleek, shiny, plastic, torpedo of a camera when Eenie (the Lady Monkey's sister) gave it to me as a gift. The camera looks like nothing more than the vision of some aggressively trendy Hollywood designer desperately cranking out retro-chic crap. It has no sharp corners, other than the edge of the built-in flash, and comes only in a bright, glossy white. The flash sits at the upper right of the camera (as you look at it), and is the size of a standard roll of 35mm film. If nothing else, the ColorSplash looks as if it would feel right at home on either a Matt Helm or Our Man Flynt set (or, Austin Powers, for you historically challenged types).

Aside from the hyper-hip styling, packaging, and marketing propaganda behind it, the hook for the ColorSplash is the colored "gels" that can be placed in front of the lens, or the attached flash (by a nifty rotating flash cover that allows easy change of up to four colors with a simple twist), that let you diddle with the color settings of the exposure. The other bell or whistle (depending on your preference) is a shutter that switches from point-and-shoot to user-determined, where the shutter stays open as long as you keep it depressed. See, the idea behind the ColorSplash is that you get to screw with exposure without resorting to something as techno-geek as aperture settings or shutter speed.

Ah, you ask, but is it cool? Do the color thingies and shutter whatzits actually result in nifty pictures? Why, sure they do, sonny. Acctually, the ColorSplash cranks out some honest to god decent shots. The first thing that surprised me was the range of focus. Normally, fixed lens cameras tend to be a bit short, and the ColorSplash is no exception, with what I assume is a 32mm lens. And, as with other short lenses, that means you can get pretty close to your subject without worrying about focus issues. Of course, if you are a Lomoclone, you don't give a rat's fat ass about focus, but that's as maybe. The color gels do add a new dimension to your picturing, and can result in anywhere from just looking as if you have a color filter over your eyeses, to really tweaking the overall colorshceme. But then again, you could get the same general effect by just using slide film and having the people at the Fotomat cross-process it during developing. The really cool part of the camera is the shutter. The flash is synced to the shutter closing, so if you hold it open, wiggle the camera, then release it, the background will emerge as an acid-influenced Frank Zappa canvas against which your central subject will stand out sharply.

In order to answer some of the asinine critics who doubt the Scadfulness of my helpfulosity, here is a bit of helpful super-sizing: This and other Lomos are available at a cool shop called ige at 7382 Beverly Blvd. Go and groove to the tunes and dig the tiny chairs, man.

My humble apologies to those of you who wanted a bit of Duende & Eggs, or at least some hardcore drinking and debauchery. The truth is, I am still recuperating from a recent trip to Las Vegas for the opening of the NCAA tournament, and am still too traumatized to get to it. however, rest assured that once I am sober enough to slam a few beers, I will be back to my old self, regaling you with tales of shame and degradation in the desert.