Holga pics
Some time ago, one of the attorneys in the office gave me a modified Holga camera.
Long story short about Holgas: They're toy cameras, basically, made out of cheap plastic. They leak light. The plastic lens distorts the image. The film doesn't stay very taut. That's all part of the charm. Lots of artsy photographers are obsessed with them.
One guy seems to make a living modifying Holgas. Mine is the pinhole Holga without the shutter or cable release. After taking my second roll of film with it, I stripped off the velcro (ripping off the velcro cover made the whole thing move) and now I just have a piece of electrical tape over the pinhole.
Roll 1 (black & white) was sort of a disaster. I took it to New York with me and had no clue what to do with it. The exposures are all wrong. I didn't have a tripod, so I set it on top of a garbage bin which appears in the bottom third of every shot.
Roll 2 was better. Also black & white, I used it with a little tripod here in the Capitol building with long exposure times (two minutes or so). My digital camera acted as a light meter of sorts: I'd set up the Holga, then point the 20D set at ISO 400 (like the film) and see what it wanted for a shutter speed at f/2.8 or f/8, and figure out with a chart the Holga's exposure.
Roll 3 was in color and a little better. I shot with that one last week, during the end of the session. I can't believe how vibrant the colors are, but they're kind of extreme - either YELLOW or BLUE. I used some longer exposure times, as long as five minutes, to help see some of the darker corners of the building. I tried to get more people in them, but every time I started an exposure, the people would leave (totally by coincidence - they never even noticed me).
The camera doesn't always have the same vignetting. Sometimes it has a weird/cool concentric circle of light off-center. And sometimes not.
I've posted Rolls 2 & 3 over here on Flickr. They're all straight from the CD I get with the film negatives and prints from Showcase, no work on them at all.
I need a better tripod, one whose head doesn't wobble. Maybe then I can get some sharper images.
Long story short about Holgas: They're toy cameras, basically, made out of cheap plastic. They leak light. The plastic lens distorts the image. The film doesn't stay very taut. That's all part of the charm. Lots of artsy photographers are obsessed with them.
One guy seems to make a living modifying Holgas. Mine is the pinhole Holga without the shutter or cable release. After taking my second roll of film with it, I stripped off the velcro (ripping off the velcro cover made the whole thing move) and now I just have a piece of electrical tape over the pinhole.
Roll 1 (black & white) was sort of a disaster. I took it to New York with me and had no clue what to do with it. The exposures are all wrong. I didn't have a tripod, so I set it on top of a garbage bin which appears in the bottom third of every shot.
Roll 2 was better. Also black & white, I used it with a little tripod here in the Capitol building with long exposure times (two minutes or so). My digital camera acted as a light meter of sorts: I'd set up the Holga, then point the 20D set at ISO 400 (like the film) and see what it wanted for a shutter speed at f/2.8 or f/8, and figure out with a chart the Holga's exposure.
Roll 3 was in color and a little better. I shot with that one last week, during the end of the session. I can't believe how vibrant the colors are, but they're kind of extreme - either YELLOW or BLUE. I used some longer exposure times, as long as five minutes, to help see some of the darker corners of the building. I tried to get more people in them, but every time I started an exposure, the people would leave (totally by coincidence - they never even noticed me).
The camera doesn't always have the same vignetting. Sometimes it has a weird/cool concentric circle of light off-center. And sometimes not.
I've posted Rolls 2 & 3 over here on Flickr. They're all straight from the CD I get with the film negatives and prints from Showcase, no work on them at all.
I need a better tripod, one whose head doesn't wobble. Maybe then I can get some sharper images.