There Is No Cat

Holgamania

I bought a(nother) new toy camera a few weeks ago, a Holga. I was getting kind of tired of the guys at the local dip-and-dunk complaining about the gyrations they had to go through to print pictures from my Diana; it shoots roughly 4.5 x 4.5 centimeters rather than the usual 6 x 6 centimeters of a square medium format camera, so they had to manually zoom in on each picture and such rather than let their automated machines handle it. Fair enough, I guess. So I got a Holga, which shoots 6 x 6 (or 6 x 4.5, another standard format for 120 film).

I screwed up the first roll I put through it. Classic mistake, a consequence of poor user interface. The Holga can shoot either of two formats, as I mentioned above, depending on which insert you place into the camera body. I placed the 12-shots-per-roll insert in, which shoots square pictures. On the back of the camera, there’s a window to show you the frame numbers with a little sliding piece of plastic to expose the numbers for either 12 or 16 shots per roll (120 film comes printed with both). There’s a little "12" and "16" embossed in the plastic. I figured you wanted to have the window open next to the appropriate number. Wrong. I missed the embossed arrow on the sliding piece of plastic. It points to the number. So when the arrow is pointing to the embossed 16, the window next to the number 12 is open, and the numbers displayed are for 16-shots-per-roll. Oops. I realized I had screwed up after I shot photo number 12 and started winding only to come across an unexpected number 13. Damn. I figured I would have the roll developed anyway, but not have it printed or cut, just in case there was something interesting on there. And that’s how I created this little triptych of my favorite local landmark.

My second and third rolls were better. I had them printed, but wasn’t terribly impressed. Where was the vignetting that’s supposed to be characteristic of the Holga? Why are the colors kind of flat?

I finally broke down this week and bought a scanner capable of scanning 120 negatives, an Epson Perfection 4990. Turns out the guys at the dip-and-dunk seem to be burning or cropping some of my photos so the vignetting doesn’t show up. Scanning my negatives, the pictures look more like what I would expect from a Holga, as seen in these two shots from a recent morning where we had had a dusting of snow that stuck to the pavement but not so much to the grass.

I particularly like the flaring on this one; it looks like a shock wave of color exploding from the sun or something. The photo is a link to a larger version that better shows what I mean than this thumbnail.

I’m still learning how to use this scanner. Scanning negatives seems rather different from scanning prints. One thing that’s interesting is that revisiting my photos from the Diana, they look even more vignetted and distorted. The guys up at the corner are just too good; they want to make my crappy photos look better.

Tags: holga diana toy camera evil clown

Posted at 11:25 AM