Today I tested out my second Lomo Instant Square camera (the first was defective) from Lomography / the Lomographic Society International, loaded with Fuji's Instax Square film. San Francisco's lovely collection of vintage streetcars seemed like an ideal subject, though they don't stay still for very long, so I had to move fast!
I already like Instax film from my experience with an Instax Wide camera, but wanted a sharper lens than either that camera or the Instax Square camera samples I'd seen. I decided to give Lomo's model, which has a glass lens AND an attachment to allow it to use the popular Instax mini size, a try.
The images taken in full sun are vivid and well saturated, and my selective testing of the 'decrease exposure' feature helped prevent certain scenes from being washed out.
(My tests at home erased bright subjects. I prefer high contrast over bright images generally, though I should NOT have darkened the exposures of the silver Philly streetcar during these tests. I know that now - I didn't have time for the first print to develop before the train left, so they both use the same setting. The last image failed to show the colors of a mural in the shade, though that isn't entirely surprising - I didn't set it to the 'increase exposure' setting, which I should have.)
The images are sharp enough looking, and since focus is a manual slider, I'm taking the blame for the few softer images.
The only surprise and area I'll need to adjust for is the viewfinder: the white building in the top row filled the viewfinder when I composed, but the sky in the print is much larger than expected. This happened with all three distance shots, so I'll adjust my compositions accordingly, and try to work closer to my subjects (which will help the images be more vivid anyway).
Instax Square prints are smaller than Impossible/Polaroid prints, and don't work in Polaroid-compatible cameras. Instax film is also less than half the cost of Impossible/Polaroid, and still appears to be more vivid and more stable, so it seems a reasonable trade-off! I'll look forward to having fun with this camera again in the future.
