You Called it Purple and Green - CUB PHOTOGRAPHY

Using Lomochrome Purple to create photos that feel as though they are from an altered state of being

Photos by Finlay Hillman-Brown

How to capture an image that does not exist alongside our waking selves?

It is the disconnect from the real world that makes dreaming so precious, a world shaped by our resting conscience, free to abstract itself from the strict rigour of our waking hours. Giving an image a dreamy, ethereal quality is a goal that has emerged in the mainstream alongside the revitalisation of film and wider acceptance of adapting vintage lenses to use on modern cameras. Perhaps this comes as a kickback to manufacturers attempts to achieve optical perfection, levels of inhuman sharpness and perfect tonality that seem as cold and mechanical as the modern world around us.

But how best to translate sleeping whimsy to awakened image?

Equipment and technique each have a part to play. Vintage lenses lack the modern coatings and multi-element designs that give modern glass it’s sharpness and true-to-life colours, instead imparting softness and low contrast that blunts the harsh edge of reality. Similar effects can be created with the increasingly popular pro-mist filters. However, vintage lenses can bring other desirable characteristics. One example is the famous Helios 44, which has beautifully swirly bokeh wide open, giving incredible separation to portraits and further removing the resultant image from reality.

With slow shutter speeds we can blur motion, creating indistinct and ghostly images. Coupled with some of the equipment mentioned and a handy liminal space in which to shoot, we can bring artistic qualities to an unexciting scene. A person standing in a corridor is boring. A ghostly figure moving down a hotel corridor, their flickering outlines shifting against the art-deco décor is unnerving and crosses the boundaries of what feels real.

I have found Wes Anderson’s style of filmography inspirational for this stylistic approach. His use of pastels, symmetry, and square-on angles imbues a similar feeling that what you are seeing is not quite real, and while this formalism is meant to invoke a vintage flair, this does not preclude the style from invoking dreamlike qualities.

After the photoshoot for style’s exploration of psychedelic 60’s fashion, I took the remainder of my roll of Lomochrome purple to create some dreamlike images. On Brighton beach and in my local woods I composed within near-liminal spaces, aiming to reach a space that felt as though it inhabited the fringes of reality. Coupled with the film stock’s dramatic colour shifts, we can infringe on the perception of our subconscious minds.