Or perhaps I should call them LOMOgraphs. Pick a section:
Well, originally I took all my photos on a LOMO, but now I have been dragged into the digital age. Until someone makes a digital camara with a LOMO lens, I will have to make do with post-processing (adjusting gamma in HSV) to get the familiar LOMO effect.
For those not familiar with the LOMO, this is a strange compact but chunky Russian camara with a rather unusual lens (originally designed for night vision devices) which somehow does a kind of gamma-correction on the light before it hits the film. Its ability to bring out colours was proven with an experiment I performed with the help of my brother. We both wandered around London with our camaras, using film out of the same batch, taking shots of the same things. He was using a Pentax SLR, and I was using my LOMO.
The results were interesting. In darker areas of the image, the LOMO lens often brought out details that were hidden in the Pentax images. We realized that no amount of post-processing could bring out the same detail from the dark areas of the Pentax images, because with the Pentax, the light level in those regions was below the threshold of the film.
At the other extreme, very bright areas were flattened in the LOMO images. For instance a street of houses painted in pastel shades showed much more obvious differences in colour using the Pentax.
However, the big difference that the LOMO makes, for me at least, is subjective. The pictures somehow look more alive and more satisfying. I can enjoy even the bad shots! Well, as I said, now I have to try and achieve a similar effect by post-processing digital images. What can you do? Two steps forward, one step back.
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