Holgagraphy | Financial District
I’ve been wanting to get a Holga medium format camera for some time and finally splurged the whopping $22.99 on a 120N at Adorama. I was always intruigued with Holga’s lo-fi design and almost surreal feel to the photos produced by them, with their distinct vignetting, light leaks, soft focus, distortion, and blur. These effects can be attributed to the camera’s cheap construction and inexpensive plastic meniscus lens which projects the entire circle of light onto the film.
I loaded my first roll of 120 color film (ISO 100) without too many issues, making sure my exposures were set to 12 and was off shooting. I shot the first half of the roll while it was cloudy outside and the other half on a really bright day in the Financial District. After struggling in the dark room to get the film rewound by hand for what seemed like forever, I dropped off the film to be processed. Six of the negatives that came back were very faint and could barely be made out, while the other six came back looking pretty good and with barely any light leaks. The fast shutter speed of the Holga coupled with the fast film I had in the camera made for poor low light shooting.
The resulting pictures from my first roll are above and after the jump. I learned a couple of lessons from my first roll too: (1) always tape the back of the camera (don’t trust the clips), otherwise it will fall off and expose your film and (2) Holga is at it’s best on bright sunny days. I was pretty happy with the results, most notably the color saturation and out of focus edges. All of these images were scanned as negatives and inverted.
If anyone has any tips or tricks, please leave them in the comments section. Check out a lot more Holga pics over on Flickr.
These are very beautiful. Now go over to the chart and put a gold star next to your name.