Film Review: LomoChrome Turquoise XR 100-400 – 120

Dec 7, 2016

3 min read

It’s been a long time since my last review and I’m sorry for letting you down during those past weeks. I’ve been busy at work and took some time off to celebrate my birthday abroad. I’m now back home and figured out that was about time to share a few images and show the possibilities of an unusual film.

I had this roll of LomoChrome Turquoise 120 sitting in my fridge since a long time and never really had the occasion to shot it. The recently acquired Rolleiflex 75mm f/3.5 was the perfect excuse to load it and bring it out for a walk.

Before we look at the images, here is a bit of information about it. It’s a C-41 film, even if it mentions “chrome” in it’s name, it can be developed at your local lab without any problem. It’s marked as 400 ISO but can be shoot up to 100 ISO according to Lomography. This will impact the colour shifting but I personally didn’t try over-exposing it so I’m not sure about how it would affect the image.

This is how it affects the colour spectrum :

Yellow become turquoise
Red become blue
Blue become orange/yellow
Green become emerald

When I went to shoot, I had no idea how it would affect the colours. In my mind it would just add a kind off turquoise hue to the global image. That’s why I was positively surprised when I got the film back from the lab! The pictures below didn’t receive any sort of colour correction, the only adjustment made was to add a bit of contrast.

All of these were taken in the afternoon between two showers of rain! When the sky was clear it turned out orange but the cloudy parts remained white and lost all the details in the highlights. This let me think that it can be burned easily but it can be an advantage if you are looking for a high-key effect. On the other hand, shadows seems to have plenty of details to play with.

This is of course a matter of personal taste but I was very happy with how these images turned out. This is not a film that I would shoot everyday but in this occasion, it helped me to turn “OK pictures” into something much more interesting.

I’m expecting to receive two rolls in 35mm so this time I’ll try to over exposed to see how it react and will share my results.

I hope this short introduction to LomoChrome Turquoise could give you a good idea of what to expect from this very unique film!