Lomo Quad Cam

 
Since this blog is still pretty fresh, I should clarify that most of my posts are going to be about older 35mm cameras, since those are my main interest. I like loading them, I like winding them by hand, and I just really like holding a hefty piece of metal that was the height of technology 30, 50, 70+ years ago. And it's so cool when they still work and still take beautiful pictures. Photography is a pretty new art form/hobby/whatever and it thrills me to see how far it's come. Furthermore, thanks to photography we have a record of the past century or so that is totally immediate and accessible.

All that being said, I still dig the new Lomo cameras. They're over-priced and using one is risking being labeled an affluent hipster, but they are fun cameras and they take interesting pictures.

I have two Lomos to date, the Quad Cam and the Smena 8m (the latter will be brought up in a later post).

The Quad Cam seems to be the forgotten bastard child of the Lomography family. On the website there are fewer Quad Cam photos than Agfa Clack photos... Which is strange because the Clack is not only not a Lomo camera, but it's comparatively rare and uses 120 film. More common is the Quad Cam's big brother, the Oktomat.

Lomo's Quad Cam takes four pictures in 1 second. All of these pictures are put on the same frame as a grid. This makes for some cool effects. The box says "capture one second of life in all of its dynamic splendor" or something like that. To me it's super basic serial photography in the same vein as Eadward Muybridge's horse experiment.

The pictures are neat though, because they all have a certain unsharpness to them, which I'm going to guess is due to four little plastic lenses, and the colours of your prints are always reminiscent of the 70s. The camera also makes a charming buzzing noise when you release the shutter, which tends to draw a chuckle or two.

To take the best pictures I've taken with the Quad Cam, my method was not so much trying to capture a second of my life as trying to sneak up on people. Avoid posing, because you'll get four pictures that look exactly the same. Those have their own appeal, I guess, but it's not using the camera to its full potential. Take pictures when your friends don't notice that you have a camera out, or wait for them to turn around before snapping away. Make sure to get up close because those little lenses need as much help as they can get to make the subject clear.

I got my model second-hand for $15, new in the box.
I'd recommend avoiding buying Lomos new from stores if you can, since they're often upwards of $40 and for how much it costs to make them, that's highway robbery. They're pretty easy to find on craigslist and ebay and you'll save at least some money.

Here are some photos featuring my fiancé:

 

Happy 420!!!

Caity Brown