I recently talked about Lomography and multi-lens cameras, and about producing the same type of multi-image effects digitally.
Announcing Multimatic, your one stop shop for multi-image digital compositing. Or Lomo-tastic digital fakery, if you prefer. It's a way to take any number of digital images, taken from any source, and put them together in a way that encourages the same type of photographic philosophy as genuine film multi-lens cameras.
For more detail about the program, go check the Multimatic web page - there are plenty of examples, and you can download the script and use it yourself. If you do, why not email me your results? That would be nice.
Building Multimatic made me much more conscious of what the elements and options involved in the compositing process were - and also more concious of the "Lomo philosophy" and its associated techniques. When I started, I took four boring images, stuck them together, was unexcited by the result, and almost gave up then. But once I understood a little more about what could be done, it seemed fun enough to keep going.
Real toy-cams like the Lomo take a lot of the precision out of photography. The idea is to point at something cool, shoot, and repeat until you get a result you like. Viewfinders are a thing of the past. I've tried to preserve (and enhance) this element of random-art-luck by allowing for a lot of non-determinism in Multimatic. It rewards experimentation. It's also fun to play with, since the results are hard to predict exactly.
There is still no "digital Lomo", but I think that there easily could be. There are any number of very-low-quality mini-digi-cams, that take video as well as still photos from an odd little lens. Video can easily be pulled apart to be individual images, so they would give two ways of capturing source frames for use in Multimatic. But there's no reason why a single-lens digi-cam can't be made that does in-camera compositing, or effects, or whatever.
Looking around the toy-cam world, I found the Split Cam. Like some weird sideshow of old, you take two photos (with any amount of time between them), and it blends from one to the other, top to bottom. If a camera like this can exist, with one and only one purpose, then how popular would a cheap digicam with a wide range of effects be?
In the meantime, Multimatic will get you a long way there. Take some photos - one or more. If you want them to look a certain way, fiddle with them in Photoshop or anything else. Whack them through your favourite Multimatic options for some interesting results.
If you use Multimatic, or have any comments or problems with it, please feel free to leave a comment or link to your photos.
Posted by Casey at March 28, 2005 10:43 AMHey Casey,
Nice piece of work fella. I'm a big fan of the motion snap-shot frame stuff myself. Although, you do have to be really careful, because how easy is it to get really tacky results! Also, I do really like the low-res, incorrect aperture balance and old film approach. Digital cameras are great, but they certainly don't have the same aura about them that the old photographic film image does. The soft focus, the possible ghostly other-worldly effects, it's hard to mimic this successfully in photoshop and it all takes time as well.
Last time I was in Melbourne, I went to Revolver and to my most drunken delight, discovered an old coin-operated photobooth in the ladies loo. The spontaneity of it all was more than half the fun.
check out our profile pic at http://ponyinvasions.blogspot.com/ for a laugh.
I just can't see myself sitting down to render these effects in post-production, unless of course, I really had to and there was simply no other option. Or I really wanted to control an otherwise random process. But then, that's not very 'lomo' in spirit is it?
x nae
Posted by: renae at March 30, 2005 01:36 PM