Peng Chau Island with LomoChrome Purple

A weekend getaway to different islands in Hong Kong is another great options for a warm sunny Saturday. Peng Chau is one of my favourite island though it is not as big as Cheung Chau but the vibe and quietness attracted me to re-discover this little outlier.

LomoChrome Purple XR 100-400 is a Lomography negative film trying to bring back the impression and colour tone of the famous Kodak Aerochrome. This single roll of film has been sitting together with the rest of my unused film for almost half a year. Since the weather was so good on that day, I decided to take it with me and shoot something differently with a Hasselblad Xpan II, Panoramic format.

After loading the film into the panoramic camera. There is one question immediately came to my mind. Which ISO speed should I use? The film was indicated 100-400 on it’s package. I read a few blogs and articles about this film most of them suggest you to shoot at ISO 200 to give the best result of its purple tone. Then I changed the ISO setting at the back of my Xpan to ISO 200. Some suggested to use ISO 100 when the environment is darker, in this case some shots was slightly overexposed by one to half stop. Through composition and guessing the colour effect from this film was fun because it is something new to me. Last time I had this feeling was with the Kodak High Speed Infrared black and white film.

Peng Chau Island is so nice because of it’s size. Great for pairs or some photo hobbyist to spend a full day just to walk around on this beautiful island. It has some nice beaches, scattered buildings and there is no tall buildings which was great.

We walked from ferry pier to get some local “Char Charn Tang” food and then continue the journey along the beach. After that we went up to Finger Hill then moved to walk along the coastline.

20 shots were fired and the film safely returned in the film canister. I sent the film to trustworthy lab – Colorluxe Express in Wan Chai Jaffe Road. And I got the scanned copy on the same day.

So now, red became purple, blue became cyan. The mood is quite special to me. I think I will try to shoot one or two more under different environment but definitely not my essential negative film. But worth to give it a try!