Holgagraphy

Just got back my long waited film from the lab! Lovely Holga!

The result is better than I expected, given that I had bad experiences with my Holga, which include the back of the camera falls off all of a sudden. The remedy? I used a couple of rubber bands wrapping around it.

Focusing is also challenging, since you can't tell anything from the viewfinder. All you can do is to make your best guess, using this guidline.

And then it comes to setting the exposure. Again, you can't do much playing with the aperture, since pratically it has no aperture setting. It has been reported that the fixed aperture is f13.3. But hey, every Holga is different, so don't rely on this too much. And bare in mind that the sunny/cloudy switch will not affect the aperture in any way.

Now comes to the shutter speed. Again, it has only one speed, which is 1/100 seconds. However it does provide a bulb mode, but your hands need to be very steady even if you put the camera on tripod. Oh well, you can probably mod the camera and add your own .

Oh, don't forget that light leaks is kind of expected in Holgagraphy :-)

Given that you have many fixed parameters with the camera, choose a film that has wider range. I used Trix 400 for the shots shown below, but a 3200 would give you more space. That said, my next roll will be Velvia 100, since I have a few of them I need to consume...

There are people out there where you can get your Holga modded. For example, you can get two aperture settings (around f8 and f11), close focusing (up to 2 feet), etc. Since the camera is so cheap and easy to hack, you may also want to DIY!

Oh, btw, if you are into BW photos, Holga do have their own Holga filter. If you don't konw yet, yellow filter reduces the brightness of blue colors that makes the photo appears more natural to human eyes. Green filter is good for shooting forestry or greenish plants. It also makes the blue sky appears more natural. Red filter increaese contrast, where sometimes it creates dramatic effects on a cloudy sky.

In Holgagraphy there is so many parameters out of our control, which is exactly where all the fun comes from.

Don't think. Just shoot!



Most information is taken from this site.

Official site: http://www.lomography.com/