Lubitel Love Positions

When it comes to the Lubitel Love manual of tips, tricks, and techniques, you and your fellow Lomographers will be the ones writing the book. As owner and primary Lomographic spouse to a new Lubitel+, you’ll surely explore its every nook and cranny, every knob and lever, and every setting and attachment in your quest for the most impossible images of the most impossible situations possible. When you happen upon a new discovery, a fancy shortcut, or a freaking mindblowing technique that no one had ever considered, then please try a little tenderness and share it with the Lomographic Community at large. A little donation in the love bank can pay you handsome dividends in the future! In the meantime, to get your love juices flowing, here are five “positions” that we’ve enjoyed many times. To see more tips & tricks see the tips section on the website!

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Multiple Partners

With the Lubitel+, you can fire as many times on the same frame as you like. Don’t take this lightly –this is powerful stuff! Fire it during the day to superimpose one subject on top of another. If it’s bright out, underexpose by two or three stops to prevent overexposure.

Shoot a subject normally and then flip the camera upside down to make the two halves reach out and touch each other. Use a combo of flash and non-flash exposures at night. Shoot a roll, rewind it, and give it to a friend to shoot in their camera (maybe even a different type of camera). Seriously folks, the possibilities are endless!

Follow this link to the multiple exposure gallery

Long, Strong & Bound to Get it On

Few things compare to the sensation of viewing a tack-sharp and glowing-out-of-control long exposure image at night. Brilliant artificial lights, cars turned into streaming star trails, and moving people rendered as ghosts are just a few of the available delights.

If you’ve got time & equipment, then pop the Lubitel on a tripod and screw in a cable release for the sharpest possible image. If not, place the Lubitel+ on something sturdy, draw a breath, and press the shutter as smoothly as possible. If you’re shooting square images, then remember – your Lubitel can be standing up or pressed sideways against a wall – it doesn’t matter for the final shot!

Follow this link to the flash & long exposure gallery
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Light Up Their Life

The Lubitel’s handy hotshoe makes for easy flash shots. And its glass lens \ makes for seriously rich and detailed flash portraits. As such, you should explore every avenue for interesting artificial light images.

At night, put your shutter on “B,” hold it open, and fire the a flash manually off camera to illuminate your subject from the side, top, or bottom – casting all kinds of interesting shadows across their face. Or keep that shutter open and use a flashlight or mini-led to literally “trace” them with streams of light.

Follow this link to the flash & long exposure gallery

Cross Dressing

Slide film is great for scanning and treating your folks to charming projection shows, but any Lomographer worth his/her chops will tell you that cross-processing (developing slide film in negative chemicals) is the freaking bees knees.

It takes that lovely and sublime slide image that might-have-been and blows it out into a hyper-saturated, insanely contrasted, and wildly color-shifted little jewel. The results are wonderfully unpredictable, and vary from film type to film type and from lab to lab. You quite literally never really know what you’re gonna get. For really understated and grainy images, you can also do the reverse (process negative film in slide chemicals).

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Playing the Field

A beautiful aspect of the Lubitel is that the shutter and advance are not coupled. Sure, you can shoot a frame, look at the little numbers in the back, and advance to the exact start of the next one. But try shooting a roll blind.

Take a photo and advance a little bit – whatever you think is proper – and shoot again. Take a far subject and then - immediately after – a close subject. Your ultimate goal should be an enormous, unpredictable, multi-exposed, and overlapping serial image.

Toss in a flash here or there, and change the orientation of the camera. Use slide film with normal slide processing for extra-easy scanning after development.

Tic Tac Toe

This is a basic method for composition that makes many of your images look better immediately. Or so it is said.

Imagine a Tic-Tac-Toe game, 2 vertical lines + 2 horizontal lines each dividing an area into thirds. (That’s why the actual name of this technique is called the "rule of thirds"). When composing your image, try to move the main point of interest to one of intersetions of the lines, or move the horizon, trees, landmarks ... on to these lines. The human eye tends to seek this points and will be more than happy to find something nice there.

If you want to make this rule of thirds your number one, print this on some foil and use it in the Lubitel+ viewfinder. Just take off the top down viewer and put it in there (maybe use a small piece of tape to stick it down).

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Into Deep

Shoot medium format film through your Lubitel+ with a close subject and an aperture of f/4.5 for an incredible portrait that’s absolutely dripping with style. Open aperture settings – like f/4.5 – allow for a “shallow depth of field” in which one portion of your image (the foreground) is focused while the rest (the background) is blurry. That blurry and creamy section is known as “bokeh” – and the Lubitel+’s multicoated glass lens serves up some of the finest bokeh in town. Look right past your subject’s eyes into that swirling, technicolor blurry-soup!

Ghost Doubles

Every one of us does doubles now and then - either planned ones, by accident or blind doubles. The ghost doubles are planned doubles that require a tripod (or a level place for the camera to stand upon) and a long cable release. First you take a picture of the place or object you want to appear in later. Don't forget to focus and don't advance the roll! Then you need to remember where the focal point was in the picture or estimate the distance (you can put your bag into the picture, focus on it, then remove it and stand on the same point later.) Take your position and release the shutter a second time, this time you're in the picture using the cable release. Because you're on the second layer, you appear just like a ghost.

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Panorama Panorama

You simply can’t get enough of the panorama stuff. Take it to the extreme and double expose one panorama with another! The numbers indicating the shots make it super-easy to go back to where the first panorama started and you just can add another layer of widespread chaos.

Structural Doubles

Expose your first layer with a series of patterns and rewind before shooting the second layer. Regular or irregular, natural or artificial, when double exposing with structures, you might get surreal combinations. Try to shoot contrasty images on the second layer for a good effect.<

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Shady Doubles

Shoot a roll of film just with shadows of you or your friends. Rewind, expose a second layer and be in the picture without actually showing your face. The shady layer acts almost like a mask. Try to play with poses, tools, colors and include it when composing the second layer.

Flash Em Through The Viewfinder

Heres a special technique for you to shoot from the waist. Size up your subject, dial in the right focus and exposure settings, and point an electronic flash (like our Diana flash) right through the waist-level viewfinder and flash your subject through the Lubitel lens.

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Double Expose with Other Cameras

Given the Lubitels twin nature of 35mm and 120 and its totally unique ability to rewind a 120 roll - its uniquely suited to absolutely freaking amazing results when fresh rolls of Lubitel shots are unloaded and shot through another camera, or vice-versa. Let us show you some of the greatest hits.

Holgon Strobe Flash by Mephisto19

A great way of using your Lubitel+ is adding a Holgon strobe flash! Use the b-setting and a small aperture (f.5,6), so your pictures are not overexposed. I like to add the lomo cable release, so I have the free hand I need for one of the techniques...

There are two different ways::

1: Just take shots as usual in bulb- mode. You'll get crazy results on one frame, the same objects many times and repetitions of itself.

2:Advance the film! Load the camera, add the cable release, darken the room, load the flash and shoot. While the flash is firing, advance the film bit by bit, so you'll get an endless overlapping shot, looking like an ultra long Superampler shot. You can arrange people around you in a circle and turn, turn, turn. There are surely more strobe- techniques. just try...!

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mirrors

Mirrors are Your Friend

Here is the equivalent of dipping your toes into the freezing water of the unknown. Many self-portraits newbies had their start by catching their reflection in a nearby mirror. Hunt out different shapes (round, square, convex, funhouse) and qualities (clean, streaky, dirty as hell) of mirrors to vary the effect. Try not to always cover your face with the camera - so we can sometimes see those pretty eyes!

Get out the Props

Hats, goggles, shades, bat ears, small puppies, Victorian-collared shirts, todays meatloaf lunch, and creepy translucent masks are but a few things at your disposal to spice up your self-portrait. Toss in an object that deeply represents your personality - or something that just happened to be on the bench next to you.

Get out the Props
It Aint Just Faces

It Aint Just Faces

Self-portraits of hands, arms, feet, legs, chests, butts, and other unmentionables count as well. Give your other body parts a chance to shine every now and then. The - look where my feet are standing - theme is an especially popular one.