I want to show a story that came from my love of Lomography. Lomography is a spontaneous approach to photography and pushes the boundaries of what we believe the rules of photography to be.
Lomographers have 10 golden rules that they adhere to, but the main point is to not think about your images and just keep shooting. I believe that using this ethos and these cameras will encourage and stimulate imaginations and therefore could play an important role in digital story telling. The images may stem from the everyday, but they seem to provoke nostalgia and may even become something of fantasy and fiction.
There are many different Lomo cameras and they all produce their own unique style of images. The photos in my story are taken on a Holga. As part of the Communites 2.0 project, the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, is planning to incorporate work with Lomo cameras into one of our small workshop sessions. We are also developing ways to apply Lomographic ‘after effects’ to digital photographs in certain photographic editing software. In the GEECS Digital Storytelling Space you can find a free plug-in download (LoMog.atn) to be used as action in Photoshop. Simply download here, install, and apply to your images. There is a choice to run two actions, one will give a ‘hard lomo’ effect and the other will give a ‘soft lomo’ effect. The key is to experiment, each image will be affected in a different way and the effects will be stronger on some images than in others.
We are hoping to develop this into a batch processing tool that will apply different effects randomly to multiple images in one go, therefore echoing the lack of control that happens in film based lomography. We will keep you updated with developments – so watch this space!!
