Lomography La Sardina Camera Review

I ordered a La Sardina camera from Lomography a couple weeks ago and it finally came in last week! It took so long because of Hurricane Sandy, but I'm actually very grateful for that because the weather has been absolutely perfect for the last 3 days. I already own the Fisheye 2 and I was getting kind of bored of fisheye pictures. To me, the La Sardina seems like the next step up from Fisheye--there are 2 different focus settings now, and the flash has different distance settings. Other than that, though, it's very simple. It has a wild angle lens, bulb and normal settings, multiple exposure switch, and it takes 35mm film. The flash does take a weird battery (CR123A) but I found it at Walmart.

 It's one of the beach editions so it's very summery looking and sort of makes me sad because summer is such a long way away :( But the weather has been lovely lately so I made my sister come outside with me and shot about half a roll of film outside. I found that, like the fisheye, it takes its best pictures in bright, outdoor settings. I didn't get to experiment with the flash much inside but I like it so far. One problem I ran into when taking outdoor pictures was that I kept forgetting to focus the lens properly, so a lot of them turned out soft and blurry but I kind of like it. That's the fun of lomography, after all!

There's a couple examples of badly focused ones. I still like them. The colors turned out very nice.

Here's one taken inside with no flash. I think if the light had been coming in the window at a different angle it would've shown up better. But I'd say you need a flash inside 90 percent of the time.

These two are my favorites. I actually remembered to focus the way I wanted to and they turned out as I planned for the most part. All in all, I love this camera and I cannot wait to take more pictures with it. It takes beautiful photos, and even the accidents turn out pretty (which is good because my photography skills could use some work). I would most definitely recommend this camera for someone who is new to lomography or new to film photography. Unless you're a complete perfectionist, you are going to find at least one charming photo in your roll that makes you want to go out and try again. That's exactly what I'm going to go do, since the weather is gorgeous.