Captured by Sam

One day, while thumbing through my phone, I saw a poster from Lomo and thought, “Where did I see this before??” “Dude!! I saw your photo on Lomo’s new film box!! That is awesome!!” I didn’t call him, I texted. What kind of monster calls people nowadays?

Hey guys, this is Sam. Welcome back to another episode of “The year is 92, but the ISO is not 100”… AKA my first time shooting LOMO.

You’ve probably seen Rafael a couple of times in my previous videos; he’s a good photographer friend of mine. He photographed this picture that was printed on the box of Lomo’s new film stock, the Lomochrome 92!! Then Rafael said, “Hey, I’m setting up a photoshoot with Rosy. Do you want to come and try out this film?” Of course, I said yes! And Rosy is the model in this picture.

So, this is how I had the opportunity to do this photoshoot with this brand new film stock featuring the model who appears on the box of this new film!! How cool is that~

LomoChrome Color ’92 35 mm ISO 400

I like 400 speed film; it’s more versatile for everyday carry. “Discover fascinating blue hues, vibrant reds, and delicate pastel undertones.” So, this film is supposed to be cooler than your average daylight-balanced film? “Rich film grain for a hint of ’90s nostalgia.” “Standard C-41 development process.” One thing to note is that this film has no DX Code, which means your camera won’t recognize the speed of this film. You either need to manually adjust the ISO on your camera or stick some DX code sticker on the film if your camera is a point and shoot and won’t allow manual ISO setting. I don’t know what kind of camera does that…

Another issue I had was that when I was loading the film, it wouldn’t catch properly at first. Maybe I didn’t load it right. We ended up having to trim the end a bit in order to load it properly.

Judging by the sample photos, they seemed to have various shades of brown, green, and blue. To truly understand, I’ll need to try it out myself.

Now let’s take a look at the photos.

We started the first shot in the shade, right off the bat, I could see the pastel undertone, and the color is quite desaturated!! We were shooting pretty close to golden hour, and this turned out a lot cooler than I expected.

I like the sign on the wall; I kinda wanted to see how the yellow would turn out. And these ones, I wanted to see how it handles direct sunlight and the contrast, the falloff between the light and shadow.

I was shooting at 400 speed. When I try a new film, I always want to try it at box speed first. I saw this dumpster in the alleyway; now we are facing the light, plus the bounce from the wall, the light is soft and even. I think the color and the skin tone look nicer compared to in the shade.

This film has a pretty noticeable grain, especially in the shadow area. At first, it kinda looks a little like… expired film? A lot of the films I’ve tried before either have a green tint or yellow tint… this one has a brown tint. It almost feels like this film was left in the middle of the desert, baking in the hot California sunlight for too long, the colors start to fade, and the film got burned a little… kind of brown tint.

Lomo films to me always have a very strong style; they specialize in making different, cool, and fun films. When you choose to shoot on this film, you have to know what you are getting; it has a specific color tone.

When I scanned and converted this roll of film, I left most of them at the default neutral color setting. A few of them I tried with the Warm tone; it definitely made the film look more brown. But other than that, I didn’t mess with the color much. So what you see is pretty much “unedited” color.

At the end of the roll, I changed to a super wide-angle fisheye lens, and these couple of photos turned out to be my favorites. And these couple of photos, I added some saturation to make the photos look more vibrant.

Thanks to Rafael and Rosey again for this fun portrait test. And then I thought, not everybody shoots portraits; let’s shoot another roll of just random everyday stuff.

Then I went to the Getty Center, and this is where I messed up. When I loaded the film, I didn’t check the ISO setting, but the setting was at 400, because I just shot another 400-speed roll right before… So at the beginning, everything was fine… 4 shots in, I all of a sudden remembered that I didn’t check my ISO setting. I was like, it’s okay, we are only 4 shots in, it’s not too late to change it. And I changed the ISO setting to 100!!!! Like what… why… how… where… was my head at…?

I don’t know if it’s the ’92 that threw me off, making me think this is a 100-speed film somehow, or I just got possessed by some evil film demon lord… So yeah, I shot this 400-speed film at 100-speed, that’s… 2 stops overexposed!! Good job, Sam…

Then I started my long struggle of deciding whether to actually pull it to try to fix the overexposures in the development process, or if I can process it normally and see… if this film can handle 2 stops overexposed (for how much I like to overexpose films by default, some of these are probably more than 2 stops overexposed…) I’m actually pretty surprised by how much detail the negative still holds.

I thought about not including this roll, and pretending this never happened, but I thought let’s see if there is anything salvageable from this, and see how this film reacts to a dum-dum like me, who made mistakes like this… and let’s take this as a lesson, guys, double-triple check your ISO setting!!!

With 2 stops overexposed, I’m still able to bring back pretty much all the details. I think the main difference is the roll looks even more desaturated, and a little bit more grainy. And after overexposing them, I don’t see much of the brown tone anymore, which I actually prefer. So I’m pretty glad it is not a total loss. What do you think…

Alright, this is it for this week’s video. Have you tried this film yet, how do you like it, leave me a comment down below and let me know… If you find any useful information, please click the like button, and please consider subscribing to my channel… for more “Did Sam mess up today” content… This is Sam, I will see you next time… bye.