Following my disasterous last effort with the holga, I decided to throw a couple more rolls through it to see what would happen. This co-incided with going to Carter’s Steam Fair which was visiting our town at the time.

If you don’t know what a Holga is, it’s basically a camera made of plastic. How exciting! If you don’t know what a steam fair is, it’s basically a fair, made of steam, oh wait…

All three of these photos were taken on Fuji Provia 400ISO, with the Holga set on it’s highly technical “cloudy” setting.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Carters Steam Fair
Fuji Provia 400

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Carters Steam Fair
Fuji Provia 400

Panning with a Holga, I never thought it would work but it did!

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Carters Steam Fair
Fuji Provia 400
Look at that piggy! Oink!

It’s now been just under a year since I got the Holga. In that year I’ve put through about 15 or 20 rolls of 120 film of varying types and vintages. A lot of people dislike the vignetting and out of focus areas that you get with a Holga, not to mention the light leaks. I’m the opposite, and infact that’s probably the only complaint I have with my copy, it doesn’t vignette enough, it doesn’t leak enough light, and the focus is too consistent across the frame.

I’m considering beating it up a bit to see if that makes a difference! I’ve seen various cheats such as deliberately unwinding the film a bit once it’s finished and on the roll, so that’s one option to fix the light leaks. I suppose I could smear some grease on the lens as well!

All in all my love affair with the Holga continues, and while things could be better, I’m not looking for a divorce yet!

One of the problems with shooting film is the lag between taking the photos, getting them developed, and getting them back. This is made worse by the fact that no lab in my area can process E6 film, and I’ve got 40 rolls of E6 film to work through…

So my films now go off to Peak Imaging, where I pay through the nose and don’t have any choice in the matter. The cost is about 50% higher than my local lab once you factor in postage, but as I said my local lab doesn’t process E6 so it’s moot.

In this case, Volksfest took place about 4 weeks ago, and I’m only just getting these scanned in. I took advantage of the fact it was a sunny day and put through a couple of rolls of Velvia slide film. On the “cloudy” setting (good old holga) it was just about ok at the ISO50 rating of Velvia, so I’m happy enough that it can be used in bright sunshine.

The problem with going to events like Volksfest is that you get sucked into the whole scene. I now desperately want a Beetle whilst my wife Abby is telling me we need a camper van.

Much as I’d love either I also like being able to afford to eat, and since my mechanical skills start and end with turning it off and on again or hitting it with a hammer, I think it’s best I stick with more modern metal!

I did fire off a fair few frames with my D200, but one car show is much like another and I didn’t really get any shots I liked. At least with the holga it brings something a bit interesting to the image.

In unrelated news, I’ve not only updated our business website over at DnL but just yesterday finished our latest client site, for Jennifer Sinclair, photographer. Who’s next?

Today I finally completed scanning, rotating, cropping and resizing my Holga 120 scans from my recent trip to Venice. Scan, crop, rotate, repeat – how exciting! Through some apparently odd quirk of my current aesthetic sensibilities, I appear to be happier with these than with most of the ones I got from my Nikon D200.

One of the philosophies of shooting with a Holga is that you should “shoot from the hip”. I embraced this when I was in Venice by doing exactly that, with mixed results. It’s fairly obvious which of these I fired off without even composing at all with the viewfinder, and which of them I took a bit more time over.

I love the colour and saturation that these have, much more than the digital images of the same subjects. Some of that is due I think to the fact it’s shot with film, although some of it may be down to my scanner as well. I also like the dreamlike quality you can get with a Holga. This is a clever way of pretending that your out of focus image is supposed to look like that. For these Venetian scenes it works pretty well.

All of these were shot on 5 year out of date Fuji Provia 400. Because the Holga doesn’t offer much control over exposure with just two aperture settings available, all have had only slight tweaks to levels to correct any under/over exposure. Enjoy!

So where does this leave me with the Holga? I still have 20 odd rolls of film to shoot, although I suspect the rolls of Velvia 50ISO aren’t much use to me. I think I now need to start being more adventurous, because as I become more adept at getting shots that are in focus, I think I lose some of the qualities that a Holga brings to an image. Next time I use it I plan to go crazy!

On Saturday I received my processed films back from Peak Imaging. These were the first rolls of 120 E6 slide film I’ve actually had processed properly, and it was really great to see the image in your hands without needing to scan it and convert if from a negative.

Problem was though, with 5 rolls of 12 exposures, I had a lot of scanning to do. It took me all day Sunday to scan in the slides, and I was happy enough with a few of them. Most of the shots were taken in Venice which I’ll post up seperately once I’ve sorted out the ones I like.

I am apparently unable to go more than 5 minutes without taking a photograph of Wilf, so it’s no surprise to see this one, taken a few weeks back when I forced him into a T-shirt to pose for pictures. This was shot on Fuji Provia 400 in my studio

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Wilf do bad things
Fuji Velvia 50

This next picture was taken in my back garden when my cherry tree was in full bloom, and we had a rare day of blue sky. I wanted to see how the exposure would come out when set to “sunny mode” and shot on 400iso film. I struggle to see how you could ever go below 100iso film even on a very sunny day, which renders my 5 rolls of 50iso Fuji Velvia a bit worthless.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Cherry Blossom
Fuji Velvia 50
More lessons learnt, I feel like I’ve got the hang of the Holga a bit now!