le 19 août 2005
Enter the Holga: My holga cameras and film came yesterday! I picked up the 120S and 120SF (second one has built-in flash). I decided to start with some FujiFilm ISO 800 color film instead of black and white. Remember, this stuff is the crazy 120mm medium-format film, not the common 35mm film.
First thing I did was modify the camera to take square 6x6 photos instead of 4.5x6. This took some effort. I used an razor blade to cut out some of the plastic bellows, and then added some black construction paper around the bellows frame to keep light from leaking. I filed down the rough spots, and loaded up the film
Today I went on a test-shoot to see how the camera performed and get a feel for it. I had very little faith in the camera actually working. Seriously - the only controls you have are the focus ring. Technically there's a switch for two different apertures, but it doesn't actually do anything. And the focus ring? Well, since you only get a viewfinder, it's all guesswork. This really is a toy. I took it to South Park just to do some practice shots. It wasn't a very sunny day - but I figured that might work to my advantage since I was using ISO 800 film and didn't have control over the shutter speed (which is rated anywhere from 1/100 to 1/200 of a second.
I finished the roll of 12 shots in about 30 minutes, and headed over to Ritz camera to see if they could actually process the film. They told me as long as the 120mm film was color, they'd be able to develop it - but they couldn't make prints. So for $4 the gave me my 12 negatives. It was up to me to get prints made. I was dying to see how the pictures turned out (if at all).
Well, I don't have a darkroom or a film projector so I took a make-shift light board, and took photos of the negatives with my Canon Digital Rebel. I used photoshop to crop the images and invert the colors. It was a messy process, and I did it kind of quickly because I just wanted to see how they turned out.
I was so pleasantly surprised to find these images on my roll of film! The Holga actually came through and produced holga-quality images! I'm pretty excited about this. I can't wait to shoot some more.
Today's Holga photos
Click an image to see it larger. They're not spectacular, but that's the whole point of Holga photography.
