Images shot on Kodak ColorPlus 200 in the Lomography Sprocket Rocket
For me, shooting the Sprocket Rocket in Yangshuo was a textbook example of shooting a favourite camera in a favourite place. I just really like them both.
We’ll get into that and some other similarities between them over the course of this blog post.
It’s weirdly nice when something about your photography gear matches up with the place you’re using it at. Imagine going to Ilford in East London and shooting some Ilford film. Or taking pictures of a big mountain in Japan on some Fuji film.
If they haven’t discontinued it all by the time you read this, of course.
Or maybe shooting some Shanghai GP3 100 in Shanghai. A niche example, but I bring it up because it’s one that I did. Twice. You can see how they went here and here.
And now here we are, back in Yangshuo, in southern China. I’ve written about this town before. That time, I was there with the Yashica Electro. This time, it’s the Lomography Sprocket Rocket.
Contents
A favourite camera and a favourite place
So yes, for me there are similarities between Yangshuo and the Lomography Sprocket Rocket. Obviously, unlike those Ilford, Fuji and Shanghai examples I gave earlier though, it’s not merely a name thing. It’s a bit deeper than that.
I’ve broken it down into three parts, with the first of these being as that sub-heading states – that both this camera and this place are favourites of mine in their respective fields.
As I mentioned in that previous post, I lived in Yangshuo from 2010 to 2012, and those two years were among the very best I’ve ever had, anywhere in the world.
I don’t have the space here to detail everything about why that was, but I will write everything up on this site one day.
For now all I will say is it was one of those lightning in a bottle times of your life where everything is joyful and exciting and worries and cares are at almost zero.
A time like I had in Yangshuo, having it in a place like Yangshuo, and the people you shared it all with are things you’ll still be thinking about on your deathbed.
A camera, no matter how good it is, probably isn’t. That said, amongst the ones I have owned and used, the Lomography Sprocket Rocket shares with Yangshuo the status of being a personal favourite.
I love shooting with this thing. Composing these panoramic scenes is just inherently more fun than the aspect ratio of a normal 35mm camera, no matter how much technically better than this thing that other camera may be.
The results speak for themselves. Very wide-angle, usually – but not always – with sprocket holes running along the top and bottom of them, and with the softness you’d expect from an all-plastic lens.
Some like the novelty of it. Others object to the gimmick. I’m firmly of the former.
They are special not just to me
So yes, both Yangshuo and the Sprocket Rocket are special to me. But things can be special to someone whilst being completely insignificant to anyone else.
My dog is the best dog in the world, but to the bloke down the street, my dog is just a dog and it’s his dog that’s the best dog in the world.
He is, of course, wrong.
And as I just mentioned, unlike that guy’s dog, the Sprocket Rocket does have plenty of fans.
There are loads of shots taken with them on the Lomography site. Far too many to be able to argue that nobody likes this thing.
I think it’s a camera that is special to the people who like it, and produces images that look special to people when put up against normal film photographs.
Yangshuo is similar to the Sprocket Rocket in this respect.
I could have had an amazing two years in my life in somewhere nondescript and that place would have become special to me whilst remaining completely insignificant to anyone else.
That wasn’t the case here, though. Yangshuo was special to people before I ever went there, and will continue to be so long after my final time there too. There’s a reason it’s regularly found on lists of places to spend some time at if you’re ever in China.
Despite the change in the feel of the place that I outlined in this post, with the overall experience of visiting Yangshuo not being what it once was, it’s still absolutely beautiful.
Those limestone karsts aren’t going anywhere, and I’d still recommend people go there for that landscape if nothing else.
Both of them have their flaws
While I had some of the best times of my life in Yangshuo, it wasn’t without its downsides.
I’m not going to harp on about them too much here, because I don’t want to sound ungrateful towards somewhere that welcomed me and gave me a home for a couple of years.
But also because some of the things I didn’t like so much probably came from mentally applying Western standards to a place in China, which is sometimes unavoidable when things get on top of you, but is actually never cool.
It’s probably worth mentioning that nowhere in this world is perfect all the time either, though.
As for the Sprocket Rocket. Yes, an almost 100% plastic camera by Lomography that sells for under £100 brand new is also going to have some flaws. It, too, isn’t going to be perfect 100% of the time.
I haven’t mentioned this yet but a few of the photographs on this post have had some weird blue oval artefact in them. You can see it right in the middle of this next one.
A light leak in the Sprocket Rocket? I don’t know.
What I do know is that it’s intermittent, which is often the worst kind of fault to diagnose. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.
In most cases as well it wasn’t super noticeable, and just felt like the kind of slight imperfection you can expect with film and cheap film cameras sometimes also.
On this next shot though, it’s impossible to ignore. Two huge ones on either side of the dancers in Yangshuo Park. A shame, and not something that can just go unmentioned if I’m publishing this particular image.
I shot another roll in the Sprocket Rocket in China, which I haven’t got around to posting on here yet, and there was a different issue affecting some of the images on that one.
However, I’ve also since then shot this roll in it back in Mansfield and there were no problems with the results from that one whatsoever.
That might be why I’m describing it as flawed here and not just useless. It doesn’t seem reliable enough to put a roll through and know for sure you’ll get 100% unblemished results.
But you might.
Or you might get some good and some bad, like I did here.
When it works as it should though, it gives me some of my favourite sets of photographs. Gimmicky or not. I just like what this thing does when it does what it’s supposed to do, which it does more often than not.
Yangshuo was similar. Most of the time it gave you the best of times, but it could be frustrating when things weren’t quite as you wished they were.
So yes, shooting one of my favourite cameras in one of my favourite places. We’re almost done here. I just have two more images to show you.
A couple of abandoned train carriages that I couldn’t find a place for earlier, and the first of the roll shot.
You can read here why that last one wasn’t the fault of the Sprocket Rocket at all. 🙂
If you liked that write-up of shooting a favourite camera in a favourite place and want more adventures illustrated with film photography, why not have a look at some of these:
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