Lomography's new 35mm camera has a lens you can fill with liquid

Lomography's latest panoramic 35mm camera has a trick up its sleeve. You can pour liquid into the lens of the HydroChrome Sutton’s Panoramic Belair Camera (yep, that’s the full name) to add some colorful effects to your panoramic shots. Lomo suggests that you’ll be able to capture photos with “vintage aesthetics, washed-out tones and radiant blur” simply by adding clear water to the lens.

It issued a Liquid Guide to give you some ideas on what to inject — ideally particle-free, water-soluble substances like watercolor paint or food coloring. You might use tea or coffee as well, but alcohol, glue, oily solutions and corrosive substances will probably damage the lens.

This isn’t the first Lomography camera with a liquid-filled lens, as Peta Pixel points out. Lomo introduced the idea in the cardboard LomoMod No.1 camera it brought out last year. That camera used 120 film instead of 35mm. Effectively, the HydroChrome brings the lens from that model to the sturdier body of a Belair.

The HydroChrome has a fixed-focus lens with a built-in f/11 aperture, though you can swap in f/16, f/22, f/32 and f/168 pinhole aperture plates. It looks like a fun way to manually bring Instagram-esque filters to your analog 35mm shots. Pre-orders for the $79 HydroChrome are now open.