Leningradskoye Optiko-Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie

I was going though a forum when I saw a thread about lomo. The term lomo sounded familiar but I couldn't remember what it was exactly. I opened the thread out of curiosity and found out that lomo was actually a kind of camera. The camera was called lomo, or rather LOMO, because it was manufactured by a Russian company called Leningradskoye Optiko-Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie. These cameras are quite popular and it even brought about a style of photography specific to LOMO cameras called lomography.

LOMO sounded familiar to me because I have a LOMO camera. Well, not an actual LOMO camera, but one that was manufactured to produce the same photo output. I was in England back in 2001 when I registered at uboot.com because they were giving these cameras away to new members. I was more interested in finding out if they would actually send me the give-away and didn't care much about the camera itself.

I didn't pay much attention to the camera when it arrived, probably because it didn't really look interesting at all or maybe because I was just discovering digital photography during that time, and I've never heard of lomography or LOMO cameras before. The camera looked like it was made from cheap plastic and it was purely mechanical. If it wasn't for the complimentary roll of film that came along with the package, I would have thought it was a toy, or a very bad joke from uboot.com.

Back to the present. I searched for that camera and found it in a storage bin covered in dust. I've lost the box, manual and the handstrap. Six years have passed and I haven't shot one picture from that camera and the complimentary roll of film that came with it was still a blank roll of film.

I asked my friend Darell about LOMO. Photography is his hobby and I was hoping he could tell me more about it other than what I've read from the Internet. He gave some reference websites and blogs about LOMO, tips on what film to use, and explained what LOMO was from a photographer/artist point of view.

I developed a new-found interest with my LOMO camera and have loaded it with a roll of film, the first time in six years, and I've started shooting with it. I'm used to digital cameras and not being able to preview my shot adds to the excitement and suspense. I used an expired Kodak film roll and I can't wait to use all 24 frames. I just hope the camera/lens still works, I'll find out when I get the film developed.

Aside from what I have already mentioned above, here is a more accurate description of the camera lifted from the product brochure I found on the Internet: It is an Actionsampler miniature 35mm camera with four built-in lenses that capture four sequential photos within each frame of the film. Four sets of 26mm single element sequentially operated lenses with a fix-focus range from 1.2 meters to infinity. Exposure intervals are 0.22 seconds per frame and 0.66 seconds in total for four frames in a sequence on each negative.

By the way, the complimentary roll of film that came with the package is still, and will probably always be, a blank roll of film. ;)