My first experience with LomoChrome Metropolis

I never was a fan of Lomography’s expensive toy cams, but I surely enjoy the crazy Lomochrome Purple rolls. So when I saw that Lomo was about to launch a new lomochrome film, I had to be part of the kickstarter & the whole Metropolis experience. And it really was an experience.

First, I had to wait for the rolls to arrive. Due to the Kickstarter process, it took a while until I could finally lay my hands on the 5 rolls I ordered. But I was expecting it of course as part of the game..

Then, I had to find the proper occasion to use one of those babies, so I would not waste it and get the best results possible. Since I don’t live in Aubervilliers anymore and because my new city (Strasbourg) mostly looks like a postcard, I did not want to play it “urban” style like Lomography’s first testers did. Of course, the colors are perfect for a concrete jungle atmosphere, but it has been already tested in those conditions, and it would have been really fake to do it here. So I decided to wait for my first shooting in the nature, and when @zykkied asked me if I wanted to shoot on top of a mountain with ancient Gallo-Roman ruins, I thought it could be the perfect background for my tests.

On our way, we passed an abandoned urbex place and did a few shots there. The Sky was really white (it was almost raining) and the ruins kind of dark, so even though I used a lightmeter, my shots are kind of overexposed there.

But then, we went up the mountain. After a short (or long, it depends on the amount of gear you are carrying) hike to the top, in the mist, the cold wind and sometimes the rain (February really is the best month if you want to pose naked in the forest), we arrived at the temple, and up here, the wind was so strong that we could barely stand on our two feet and sometimes had to duck in holes waiting for it to pass. So we could not shoot for so long, and had to hike back to our car. I managed to shoot most of the roll, but sadly not all of it.

I had to finish the roll at home, in my apartment, so I could send it to the lab as quickly as possible to see the results. So I waited until my next shoot with the great @rubymnd and took the last 4 pics on the roll. But I wasn’t sure about the lab, and did not want to take it to my usual store in Germany (DM cheap automatic color dev, 7€ ~ for dev, scan and prints…), so I had to send it to my old lab in Paris, Nation Photo, because I know for sure that they are familiar with odd (and expensive) lomography devs and scans. But somehow, the postal service took forever to send my roll to Paris, and when it arrived, the COVID pandemic started.

I waited, and waited, and finally, Nation Photo was allowed to reopen. They started processing all the rolls they had received, and a few weeks later, here they were ! Nation Photo did a really good job on the scans and I can say that I’m really happy with how the colors turned out!

So… what can I say about this (35mm) film ?

It has a strong contrast, and low saturation (but you already know that)
The grain is quite big, don’t use it if you like really fine grain.
Be careful about the lights. I have the impression that the film is not as permissive as usual colorfilm, and has the tendency to be quickly overexposed. But if you underexpose it, the grain will come out even bigger, and you’ll lose the contrast !
The film works fine indoors and outdoors, my apartment was quite dark and the light were really bright outside, with a really white sky, and both sets came out fine on the same roll.

As you can see above, some of my pictures turned out to be overexposed, even though I used a good lightmeter. This film seems to be really picky on light so make sure to be extra careful about the exposure !

Some indoor shots I took to finish my roll.

Here’s an underexposed picture, you can see how big the grain is here.

All pics were shot with my Canon AE-1 + 50mm 1.4 / 28mm 2.8
Development & scan by Nation Photo (Paris) www.nationphoto.com

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