Lomo­chrome Purple

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Shortly before I left London a couple of years ago I got a roll of the Lomo­chrome Purple film, a new formula designed to mimic the surreal colour infrared film you used to be able to buy. The real deal is no longer manu­fac­tured, and needed a special lens filter, but gave you surreal candy coloured trees and grass. Out of date rolls from the bottom of people’s freez­ers cost a small fortune on eBay, and have no guar­an­teed result after all those years. I tried out the new Lomo film on a wander around Black­heath in SE London, and got the negat­ives developed, but then my film scan­ner broke. I got a new one a little while ago, so it was time to scan it.

I used Silver­fast scan­ning soft­ware rather than the built in scan­ner soft­ware, and it makes a huge differ­ence with colours. If you ever scan colour negat­ives, and espe­cially any kind of cross-processed or exper­i­ment­al colour, then I recom­mend spend­ing the €49. The soft­ware is in no way user-friendly, but once you get used to it, you will get far better film scan results than you would other­wise.

I would say the good shots came out really great, and the dud ones were unus­able. The film claims to be 400 ASA but is way, way slower, and only useful in full sunlight or with flash. It’s also quite grainy. It’s at its best with veget­a­tion in the shot as well.

This is my favour­ite of the photos I ended up with. I’ve put prints up for sale in the shop.

I thought sunset over the Thames would be a sure­fire winner with this film, but this was the only usable shot, and it’s still very grainy and needed a lot of light­en­ing and lift­ing in Photoshop to bring out the detail. Best to stick to bright daylight.

Daytime shots have a real Scar­folk look to them.

I actu­ally have no idea where this place is. It just appeared as one photo on this film.

I would over­ex­pose the film by at least one stop in future use. Photos that were exposed at the recom­men­ded rate were very dark and needed a lot of lift­ing in Photoshop. With a longer expos­ure I could have got a stronger, rich­er purple in the houses. I’m keen to get anoth­er roll of the film for future exper­i­ments.

 

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