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.