We got our new LOMO’INSTANT just before the holidays so of course had to take it out and test it out during travels home for the holidays so here’s a review of the camera.
In case you aren’t familiar with the Lomo Instant, it’s produced by Lomography, who has brought the Diana and classic Lomo cameras to us before. It uses the widely available Fuji Instax Mini film and the camera body comes in a variety of colors.
In the hand
The Instant is pretty standard sized, much like a large point and shoot and comes with a few interchangeable lenses but comes by default with a wide angle that’s good for many purposes. The other lenses are a portrait lens, fish eye and close up lens. They all screw in and are easy to switch out. The shutter button is a bit different but easy to use and the body comes with a tripod mount and you can use a traditional cable release for long exposures. The camera is pretty light, and while you can’t put it in your jeans pocket, it’s still pretty portable.
Creativity and shooting options!
One of the nicest things about this camera is that you can take longer exposures without flash and also multiple exposures! There’s a switch to change the shutter (which defaults at 1/125 sec.) to Bulb mode and there’s also a toggle for MX (Multiple EXposures). Pretty fun tools to have on a camera like this. You can do stuff like take one shot with the fisheye and then do a multiple exposure with the portrait lens to get really interesting looks that would be tough to create otherwise.
Additionally there are lots of ways to shoot to give you maximum control (relatively speaking). Typically I found myself using the Creative Mode with the flash turned off the most.
Oh yeah with regards to flash – the kit comes with four gels you can slide in front of the flash for color splashes – but you can just as easily take any gels you have yourself, and trim them to size to have even more colorful options!
Conclusions
So what did we think after playing with this for a couple weeks? Our Lomo Instant review would be a resounding endorsement. This is a fun camera with some nice controls to let you be creative and make the kinds of images you can envision. Having limitations is always kind of nice since it forces you to figure out what you can get out of the tool, and the Lomo Instant is great this way.
Up next I want to try using an optical slave flash while shooting in the dark to see what kind of neat effects that can create – something I’ve been playing with while shooting Impossible Project Polaroid film as well!
