Turquoise is a very interesting film. I pre-ordered this film over a year ago, and after delay after delay, it finally arrived. I knew that compared to Lomography Lomochrome Purple, I would get drastically different results. For my first roll, I decided to shoot at 100 ISO. I don’t shoot at 100 as often as I would like, and since Turquoise is rated 100-400, I thought I would give it a go. For my first location, I went to a fiberglass graveyard. I have seen many of the cityscapes from other Turquoise examples, so I thought I would try something different. Shooting the graveyard in Turquoise was the first time I felt I captured the weirdness of the place. Shooting greens to turquoise and flipping the sky to orange made for some very dream-like shots.
The weirdness of the fiberglass graveyard really makes Lomochrome Turquoise otherworldly. The color of the grass is off just enough to feel like another planet. the silver of the fiberglass molds has shades of orange that look more like rust. The actual rust on some of the molds has turned blue, green, or Turquoise, which looks like organic growth. The most obvious change to the environment is the sky which is the most common thing to look for in this film. Any blue sky will become more Mars-like which again adds to the foreign otherworldly feel. I did add two regular photos so you can see what it looks like without all the color shifts. Next time, I would love to take comparison shots with another film stock or digital to have better side-by-side comparisons.
I did notice some variation in the color shift with Lomochrome Turquoise, depending on the camera settings. While I wish I had written everything down, like my camera settings and what I was exposing for, I did happen to do one comparison shot. Below you can see the same photo, but one is exposed for highlights, and the other is exposed for shadows. After scanning the images, I evened them out, but you can see the color difference immediately.
I also took shots of downtown La Crosse where I live, so that I could see how much variation in colors there would be in the different bricks of the buildings and the other man-made materials. One of my favorite shots is the La Crosse Players statue. These photos were taken back in September, so the foliage and flowers are very vibrant. You can also see the sky is very different from the other two shots of the downtown area. I believe that is because of what I was exposed for and the time of day. The two city shots were exposed for the sky in the middle of the day, while the statue was exposed for the statue and was taken a few hours later.
Lomochrome Purple has been one of my favorite experimental films for the last few years. Below you can see a comparison of the two. These were taken two years apart with two different cameras, so it is not an exact comparison, but you get the gist. The Purple was shot on a Kodak Stereo Camera, and the Turquoise was shot on the Canon Elan II with a 24-105 L Series lens, but I think the quality is negligible for this comparison.
Skin tones were something I kind of avoided with this roll because, after seeing examples online, I felt this was not the best for portraits. But a few did sneak shots did sneak their way onto this roll. A friend grabbed my camera while I was shooting with a different one and snapped a photo of me. You can see my face as I yell, “Stop! not that film camera!” The other two shots I took to see how other skin tones would compare and to see how much orange would exist with limited sunlight.
I have three more rolls, and I am unsure what I will shoot, but I do know I have more tests I want to do, like trying different ISOs, under and over-exposing, and maybe seeing how color filters affect the shot. I think I still prefer Lomochrome Purple, but I am sure this film will grow on me.
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