Open gallery in a new window

Shot with a Lomo Colorsplash camera on Agfa Ultra film. I did basically no color alteration apart from a little correction in a few of the daylight shots.


Open gallery in a new window

Open gallery in a new window

Not that you'd ever actually want to. I've taken some of my favorite photos with my freakishly bulky Holgaroid, and I wouldn't continue to spend a silly amount of money on nasty Polaroid film if I thought I could simulate the real thing. All that aside, I found myself working with an existing image which I needed to give the "Holga look". In experimenting with various techniques, I discovered something fun.

Adobe Photoshop CS2 introduced the Lens Correction filter, designed to precisely compensate for various lens "flaws": barrel and pincushion distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration. Just as you can use the filter to remove these problems from an image, you can invert your settings and use the filter to introduce distortion, create a vignette, and add color fringing. . . which just happen to be some of the things that make a Holga unique. Tweak the levels, curves and colors, and you've got something that's pretty convincing.

Employing the filter in this way is basically using it in the exact opposite manner for which it was designed. I love that.

  
Open gallery in a new window