Lomo

The shutterbug fever has caught Singapore by storm in the recent years. You can easily spot young adults, or even teenagers, lugging their bulky SLR and tripod at tourist attractions and social events, so much so that sometimes, I feel like an outlier snapping away with my point-and-shoot digital camera.

I feel a tinge of pity when our pursuit for imagery perfection has unknowingly obliterated a part of our past. How many of us can still remember loading a roll of Kodak 200 film carefully into the back of an automatic camera, making sure that the film "catches" onto the "teeth" of the loading mechanism? Or the frustration when the entire roll of film is destroyed when it is exposed to white light? That was probably a common scene 15 years ago, but now it has sadly entered the book of history.

I gotta say this piece of my childhood memory simply flashed across of my mind when I was fixing my watch at a nondescript watch retailer near my office. As the "uncle" went on doing his job, I gazed at his shop display, and there it was, in front of me, a cabinet filled with colourful boxes of Kodak, Fuji and Konica photographic film. In a period where everyone owns a digital camera, it is surely surprising to see the good old photographic film. It signifies the era when you are forgivened when the pictures turn out blurry or crooked, because there are no second chances i.e. what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It was a world without Photoshop or other photo editing programs, and you may be asked to see a shrink if you claim you can contain 1000 pictures in a plastic chip 1/10 the size of a name card (what we now call the SD card).

I miss the world with imperfections, like how images are captured using a Lomo camera - no focus, no flash functions, giving a raw perspective to the oh-so-perfect world.