Over the years, I’ve accumulated a truly embarrassing amount of film stock. I’ll freely admit that it’s a sickness. If I’m being honest with myself, it likely stems from a fear of missing out on something creative and new and a fear that one day it’s all going to be gone. One day, the last roll from the last batch of the last stock is going to come off the production line, and that’ll be that.
Of course, the chances of that happening anytime soon are fairly low. Film production took a steep dive a decade ago, but in the intervening years, the popularity of analog shooting has skyrocketed. Several once-dead stocks and formats have returned (Kodak Gold 120 and Fuji ACROS 100 are two examples), and companies are now competing with each other to produce new products. Many of these products are simply respooled stocks, such as Kodak cinema film or Gold, but there are some genuinely new products as well.
This year, Lomography released a new stock called Lomo 92, which is advertised with a distinct eye toward nostalgia. While I’ve never been one for navel-gazing toward the past, I’ll admit that this new stock does have a legitimately retro feel. Boiling everything down, I found that during my testing it produced strong warm and green tones, with inky black shadows and higher-than-average grain for a 400 ISO film.
During the United Nations General Assembly, I tested several rolls in various lighting conditions and with several different cameras. I also tested a roll in Los Angeles and another in San Diego. For these images, I shot with a Nikon F6, a Hasselblad XPan, and a Widelux FV. The negatives were developed locally and scanned using a Nikon 9000 scanner, with some minor corrections in Photoshop.
I found that it performed best in bright, sunny conditions—the warm tones worked well here but didn’t overwhelm the image. At UNGA, however… let’s just say there’s a reason tungsten-balanced films exist. The ancient fluorescent lighting in the UN Headquarters created a deep green cast that was a pain to correct in post and did me no favors in terms of the final product. Still, the images were generally interesting, and I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable sending them to an editor. I found that underexposing by a stop produced decent images under these conditions, while overexposing tended to wash out the colors more than I’d like. However, for some, that particular look may be desirable—the washed-out colors remind me of early color process images from the 1950s or 1960s.
For street and portrait work, particularly in LA and San Diego, the film performed well. Again, the color balance tended toward warmth, but it didn’t overwhelm the blues or magentas. The grain was most noticeable in the shadows, but it wasn’t so obvious as to be distracting. There’s a slight grittiness to the final negative that a good photographer can use to their advantage.
While this is a limited-release product, it would be a mistake to think of it as experimental. If anything, a strong argument can be made that this is a deeply traditional film in the right hands. It threads the line between Kodak Gold and Fuji 200 with a unique grain structure that favors bright to even lighting conditions.
Overall, I found Lomo 92 to be a solid and affordable color film for photographers looking for a distinctive, retro look; however, they should be mindful of lighting to avoid harsh overexposure.
