I usually tell people that my "serious hobby" phase of photography started in February 2005, when I had got a my first digital camera and joined Flickr. In fact, I had already been on Lomo for almost a year before that. Why Lomo? The answer is that I had saw documentary on the Lomo LC-A, and the cult that grew up around it. A cheap little camera (At least, it was cheap back then.) that didn't do "proper" photography, but blatently imperfect.

Pink Bicycle (01 Jan 2005)The lens generated an extreme vignetting effect, heightened contrast, and thus (as I learned later when experimenting with Photoshop.) added extra saturation to the mix. Add in the long-exposure, and the super simplistic aperature control, which which demarcated the mere 3 settings into "person", "people" and "landscape") and you had a camera which could take dreamy close-ups in chiarosurco, or garish light streaks, or alien landscapes. It seemed a camera with magical imperfections. Enough to build a small cult around it, and other "toy" cameras. Enough to entice me into getting one off eBay rather then the ridiculously pricey eShop of the Lomographic Society.

But kudos to the Lomo Society website. If the strikingly garish images on the TV enticed me, the cult like user-unfriendly website full of arty randomness sold me totally. Once you actually worked out how the hell to get around the site, you could browse around a world (literally) of super-satured blurs and close-ups from people of all ages and all mind-states. To the naive me of three years ago, it all looked like a new artform. Of course, it's a bit of a con. It's a bit like blogs. Most people don't really do much with their Lomo, and it's only really the true fans that make all those striking images. But at the time it seemed like I was entering a shadowy world of guerilla art, rubbing shoulders with clubbers from Barcelona, gay Filipinos, San Francisan goths, French blokes with girfriends who strip off for their pinhole camera, and all the usual sort stuff one expects when one defines "artiness" as "the other", as if it's something that flows from personality rather than works.

Oh yes, I had some rather fucked up ideas about art a few years ago: thinking it was something that was given to you as opposed to the radical idea of actually going out and claiming it for yourself. And so I remember getting rather pissed off whilst waiting for my LC-A to come the Ukraine, and it getting delayed on the rather piss-poor excuse that there was some sort of Orange Revolution going on at the time. Oh come on chaps, you can have your democracy, but can you not deliver my camera first? It's my hot ticket into the world of photography you know.

Of course, I didn't literally believe a small compact camera would turn me into a Serious Artist, but there was the sneaking suspicion at the back of my mind that it would be an easy shortcut into that rareified world, that I could use it as some sort of disguise. People would say "Hey, he's serious he's got a Lomo! And looks at those amazing pictures." Stop laughing at the back there.

Of course, it's bollocks. For a start, although the Lomo does most certainly have a background wierdness which adds to the picture, for really amazing Lomo pics, you have to work technically with the camera the way you would with any other camera. Secondly, not very many people outside of the Lomographic society have actually heard of the Lomo. I was actually very lucky to catch that documentary on telly. (We're talking a late night BBC 4 doumentary, here.) The cult status of Lomo has pretty much remained a cult status, which no doubt explains why the Lomo Society have been expanding the definition of "Lomo" to "any camera with quirks"- a definition which means that an old workhorse Soviet-era camera which was my dad's first SLR is now a "Lomo".

However, for the brief period of my Lomo-love, it was amazing. I remember experimenting with slide film and b/w and somehow coming up with images I didn't think I was capable of. Of course the point was that I was obviously capable of them, I just didn't think so at the time. But I still have some fond memories of pictures I took with the Lomo, which I used in earnest from the end of 2004 to 2005, including my New Year in Barcelona. One of them, of the Christmas lights at El Raval, was one of my first published pictures, used in Schmap's Barcelona Guide.

To be honest, most of my Lomo pictures of this period were pretty poor. Poor in the sense that they seemed too detached, and too clean for classic Lomo. So I became a bit disillusioned, thinking I was crap at this game. In fact, it was my thinking that was crap. I was acting like something was going to come to me, to fall in my lap, some great artistic truth was going to reveal itself to me via a cult Russian camera. Of course it wasn't going to happen. It's something you have to work at little by little, and keep doing. Of course, you couldn't tell me that at the time, and so, although the Barcelona pics were showing marked improvement, I decided to take the plunge and go digital.

By the time I was next in Barcelona, a mere 4 months later, I was using the Lomo, and the results this time were far better. By this time, I had finally got an awareness of what the Lomo was capable of, how it functioned under differing circumstances and film types, what worked and what didn't, and what I could achieve using it. All those "poor" pictures were in fact good practice, and now I could pull out the Lomo when I saw a particular scene that could benefit from it's peculiar effect. However by this time, I was fully into the wonders of digital and Photoshop, and my little Pentax Compact was in the ascendant.

Jen @ EOTMC: 01 (31 Oct 2005)I think it's rather telling that ever since then, when I've gone Lomo, it's been as an artistic choice, something I choose to do in order to achieve a particular look that I know the camera is capable of. My first major use of Lomo was after a b/w film class weekend at Streetlevel. Not long after that I used my Lomo with a Coloursplash and b/w film, and shot away at the End of the Month Club Hallowe'en party, and then hand-developed and printed the results the weekend after, and it was probably some my best Lomo work. I've used the camera occasionally since then, but my love affair with the clunky Russian beast has long since cooled. Little did I know it, but everything I was looking for was closer to home. but more about that later...