Film Review : Lomography Color 400 – 120

Jul 25, 2016

3 min read

Today we are looking at the 2nd roll shot on my Mamiya M645. Lomography Color 400

I never really planned on shooting with this film but I saw a pack of 3 rolls for around 25€ the other day so I figured why not giving it a chance. I thought it could be fun to try this film to give an old look to my images.

For what I’ve seen from this roll is that the results are pretty inconsistent even under the same lighting condition. You can see below an example of 2 pictures taken minutes appart, with the same settings and light condition.

We can clearly see that the right one has really cold green/blue tones whereas the left one is warmer and tends to shift toward magenta. To be honest I don’t like the color rendition on those two pictures. I must add that they were scanned at the same time and didn’t do any sort of post processing here.

Here is another example of this “issue” with two pictures of the same scene taken seconds apart (again no adjustments for those two shots) :

I feel that Lomography is better for shooting people as you can see with the series of portraits below. On the left side is the file straight out of the scanner, on the right side I’ve increased slightly the exposure + contrast and added a bit of blue. I think that the skin tone looks much better after cooling down the temperature and the picture came back to life with those minor adjustments.

The pictures below received only slight exposure and contrast adjustments (no color correction here). I kind of like the look and warm tones on this series but that’s not something I will be always looking for.

After doing some researches, it appears that Lomography isn’t making their film themselves but instead they are simply repacking other’s brand film instead. In this case you are getting “Ferrania Solaris FG Plus 400”.

We can also see that it’s very good to give details in the shadows but will not retain much information in the highlights. This might have something to do with the fact that I purposely over-exposed of one stop.

In conclusion, I’d say that Lomography films are good if you want to give a vintage kind of look to your pictures. They are probably good to shoot at the golden hour and enhance the yellows and reds however I would not recommend to shoot landscape as the colours don’t seem to be very accurate (but as I said above, this my be because of my lens)

Would I buy again this film? Probably not because it’s not the kind of look that I’m looking for but it might suit your tastes. I still have two rolls to shot so let’s see how they behave under other lighting conditions and maybe I’ll change my mind.