Lomography films don’t just have to be for lomographers! Lomo 100 can be an excellent budget landscape film as well.
One Roll Review is a series of blog posts where I review a single roll of film I’ve used. I’ll discuss the photo taking, the gear, and of course the film a bit. In this review, I took a roll of Lomo 100 with my RB67 out for some nature photography.
Lomo 100, how good is it for landscapes?
If I’m lugging around my big Mamiya RB67, it’s usually to chase after some landscape photos. With color film currently being so hard to get, I was excited to be able to get this 3 pack of Lomography 100. So I loaded up my first roll and hit the hiking trails to see how it does in nature.
This roll of Lomo 100 went through two different days out on the trail. One day ended up being more focused on woodland photos, the other was on waterfalls. In 120, this film made for a great landscape film.
Colors are less intense and saturated compared to Ektar 100. I would also say it’s easier to scan flatter, with less contrast as well. If you’re looking for a little more subtlety in your photos, Lomography 100 could be a less expensive alternative. Like most color negative film, it has pretty great highlight latitude, and I had no issues in the shadows either.
With this roll being 120, grain isn’t really a problem. It certainly seems like it would be more noticeable than Ektar in 35mm. However, this review is for the 120 format, and grain isn’t a problem here. It’s got plenty of sharpness for flatbed scanning as well. Overall, I’d say it’s a great, lower-cost option for landscape photography.
The experience
Working with a slow film for waterfalls is always a fun time. It gives you the perfect excuse to stop down and get those longer-timed shutter speeds. I always enjoy guessing what water flows will end up making neat patterns over a long exposure time. Sometimes you end up with cool whirlpool effects or neat shapes like the crescent under the tree in the photo above.
I find that for a landscape shoot, that’s a good pairing for the RB67. That camera isn’t my favorite camera to handhold, so it spends a lot of time sitting on tripods. That said, it’s not a big deal to me to go out on landscape shoots with a slow film like Lomo 100.
However, the woodland trail walk was done in a group photo walk. That day I was kind of wishing I’d brought a 35mm camera with 400 ISO film. Sometimes you get in a group that doesn’t slow down to smell the roses too much, and the RB with slow film wasn’t the best choice for that!
Despite that, I did still get a few photos I liked that day. In fact, I only ended up shooting five photos. three on this film and two on some Ilford SFX200. Side note, swappable film backs are awesome.
Woodland photography is something I’ve been working hard on learning since we moved to Arkansas a few years ago. I still struggle to pick out compositions from the chaos. The photo above, I think, is a good example of that. I liked the baby pine tree in this gorgeous backlight. However, I think I’d have been better served by getting closer and/or swapping to a longer lens as well.
End of the roll
In the end, I’m overall pretty happy with this roll of Lomo 100. I think the film and I were able to capture some decent photos together. I’m happy with the color, grain, exposure latitude, and all the usual things you judge a film by. I also thought it scanned pretty well. (Dev’d in Cinestill CS41, scanned on Epson V550 w/ Silverfast.)
I’m really excited to take my remaining two rolls out to capture some fall foliage. It should handle the color well, and I think with more practice scanning it, I’ll get the color down even better. Besides, what landscape photographer doesn’t love Autumn?
If you enjoyed this post, check out my other One Roll Reviews here. Don’t forget to share, and feel free to drop a comment below!