The Lomography XPro Slide 200 Film and My Holga: An In-Depth Review

An Argentinean writer and photographer living in the Pacific Northwest, Lorraine Healy is a long-time fan of plastic cameras and is the author of “Tricks With A Plastic Wonder,” a manual for achieving better results with a Holga camera, available in eBook form at Amazon.com. In this article, Healy explains how she fell hard in love with the Lomography XPro Slide 200 film and why she takes it on her many travels.

In April 2011, I returned to Northern Argentina for eight days of photographing the great landscapes and color. Twenty months before, I had gone to the same provinces of Jujuy and Salta and had been taken by surprise by the blinding brightness of the light—a detail I had not remembered from my last visit to this area when I was 10! As a result, my Holga shots, taken with my usual 400 ISO negative film, had highlights blown beyond any software’s capacity to recover. This trip I was determined to be prepared and had bought an array of slower films to match the light. One of them was the Lomography XPro Slide 200, and I could not have imagined how I would fall in love with this golden-toned beauty.

When using a Holga 120 camera, with one real aperture somewhere between f8 and f11 and a cheap plastic lens, you have very little control beyond gauging what speed film will best meet the needs of what you are photographing. In most cases, going with the factory-recommended 400 ISO is a solid idea. However, there are some places in the world where the light is going to be too bright for 400, as I had found out.

Since then, I have never gone anywhere without a lot of Lomo XPro 200 rolls. Not only does it pay to be prepared for stronger light than imagined, it is such a versatile film you can easily forget you are dealing with chrome—traditionally a much less forgiving medium than negative film, meaning you have to get the exposure right in camera because chrome has no latitude for recovering details after processing.

I live in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., a region famous for its overcast skies and frequent rain. The light is soft and lovely, but certainly far from bright. Yet time and again even in those conditions the Lomo XPro 200 has delivered results I love. Here are two images taken under typical PNW light near my home.

Yes, they are a tad dark, but nothing that I cannot fix with five minutes of dodging and burning in Photoshop. To my eye, the muted colors match the subject of this ancient, weathered truck having a second life as a planter.

Of course, xpro means this film does not have to be processed as slide film (E-6 process) but that it can just as easily be processed in C-41 to get a different kind of look. Personally, I can’t get enough of the Lomo XPro 200 processed as chrome. It has a citrusy hue that adds to the ethereal quality of the Holga lens.

Lest anyone think the Lomo XPro 200 can only do serene landscapes, let me show you some shots I got in Las Vegas. There is nothing serene about the chaotic Vegas Strip, and the Lomo XPro 200 came through!

One beauty of working with Holga or Diana cameras, where shutter and winder are not connected, is that you can advance your film as much as full complete frame or as little as you want, creating an in-camera panorama that is seamless but full of character.

Want to get wackier? Try shooting double exposures. The Lomo XPro 200 can take it. For this image of the Coupeville Wharf on Whidbey Island, I used the Lomo Splitzer, an accessory that should be in every Holga shooter’s camera bag. I took the top exposure with the Splitzer blocking half of the lens, then flipped the Splitzer to cover the upper half of the lens, flipped the camera 180 degrees and took the second shot.

Once you get your film back from the lab, scan the Lomo XPro 200 as you would any other slide film. I find that post-processing in Photoshop takes less time when using this film, partly because positive (chrome or slide) film does not attract as much dust as negative film emulsions. So you spend less time cloning those bits of dust.

Scanned and cleaned and not convinced you should have used this golden-hued bad boy? A click on Photoshop’s Auto Tone and/or Auto Color usually gets rid of the warm color cast and adds vibrance and saturation to the colors. Or you can play with effects and presets like the ones carried by plug-ins Nik’s Color Effects or onOne’s PhotoSuite and see what looks good to you.

Here is one shot I took a few weeks ago in Needles, California, and the slightly different results I got by “playing” with the image afterwards.

As we say in Spanish, “Sobre gustos no hay nada escrito”—taste is very much a personal preference. The warm tonality of the Lomo XPro 200 may not be to your liking. But if you shoot plastic cameras or old, vintage medium-format finds from the thrift store, you know choice of film is one of the very few variables you can control. Allow yourself to be surprised by the awesome Lomo XPro 200. Bet you a few piggies you will not regret it.

written by Lorraine Healy on 2015-03-23 #gear #review #120-film #holga #holga-n #lomography-xpro-slide-200-120 #holga-s