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The Lomography Lomo’Instant Wide Gets a Legitimate Modification

Chris Gampat
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06/27/2017
2 Mins read
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

All images by Albertino. Used courtesy of his website and blog post.

In many ways, the Lomography Lomo’Instant Wide an almost perfect Instant film camera except for the fact that it doesn’t have manual exposure abilities. But Albertino, the same man that designed the Lego Instax camera, finally has his own hack. The hack involves taking the lens off the camera and using a third party one mounted to it.

In an interview with Lomography Magazine, Albertino tells them that hack involves using a vintage Ross Ensign F3.5 105mm lens extracted from the Ensign Selfix 8-20 made in 1952. For those of you thinking that f3.5 isn’t a fast lens, consider the fact that f3.5 is being done with a significantly larger format the 35mm small format. Plus, the original Lomo’Instant lens is f8.

Here’s a gem from the interview:

It provides an answer to something that people keep asking about. Is it possible to modify a Lomo’ Instant Wide? How to enhance the picture quality of the Lomography camera? It uses again a vintage lens that enhances the photo quality to our golden film era. It also brings a lot of fun and excitement to the instant photography. It frees the photographer from the prison of the automatic shooting mode. It enables him to decide what’s the optimised settings to shoot under particular situation, and every situation can be different. It puts the control back to the photographer.

I truly feel that after we got a taste of the convenience from modern technology, like in digital photography, online shopping, meal delivery, video on demand, instant messaging, we will reach a point that we start to treasure the “real life experience” that we have before these technological advancement.

Of course, the Lomo’Instant Wide was designed with mass appeal in mind and targeted people who wanted to point and shoot and those that knew how to work within the limits of that system. But with this hack, the Lomo’Instant Wide lets a photographer shoot fully manual even with studio lights. The video above shows that off.

For the life of me, I’m still not sure why there aren’t any cameras with full manual controls right out of the box for Instax, Instax Wide and Impossible Project film.

Here are two sample photos from Albertino:

 

Check out the blog post on his website.

Albertino camera film instant instax lens lomography Lomography Lomo'Instant Wide Hack modification wide
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.