A while back I ordered some Lomochrome Purple from the nice people at Lomography. The film allows you to shoot infrared-style photographs. Although the resulting photographs look very different from standard color negative film (greens become purple shades), they are developed using the same C-41 process.

The film mimics Kodak’s old Aerochrome (slide/E-6) film line, which was used by the US military for infrared-style aerial photographs. It was more recently used by photographer Richard Mosse for his images documenting Eastern Congo.

Aerochrome was discontinued in 2007, and now (happily) Lomography has produced a very similar style of film.

For a while this film sat in a box in the hall. I don’t shoot that much in the countryside, and it seemed a waste to use the film to shoot urban scenes. I decided to load some into my G2 on a trip to Hatfield house a few weeks back.

A week or two later we headed to Wimpole Hall farm and fired off a roll of Purple there too, this time loaded in my new FM3A (a vehicle for using Nikon lenses with Film, but very good). This time I would be using Manual Focus lenses.

One of the problems I encountered with the first roll was that either in processing or scanning, colour correction had been applied, and had turned the skies yellow. Luckily, some tinkering with the scans in Lightroom sorted things out.

The results are interesting and I think it is a fun film to carry in the pocket to do something different. Who knew what goats in purple fields looked like? 🙂

Taken with (i) Contax G2, 45mm and 21mm lenses; and (ii) Nikon FM3A, Voigtlander 40mm, Voigtlander 20mm and Nikon 105mm F2.5 AI-S.